Achieving an AIDS Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment (Book Preview)

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Over

“Mead Over proposes a canny model for marshaling and coordinating donor contributions to AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries. Achieving an AIDS Transition includes prudent and detailed plans that promise to bring us all closer to a transition long overdue.”

— Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health “Living with AIDS is clearly better than dying with AIDS. But the best outcome is to return to an AIDS-free world. Mead Over's book provides the essential foundation for understanding the transition.”

— Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

Mead Over, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, is one of the world’s leading experts on the economics and cost-effectiveness of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment Achieving an AIDS Transition

“There is an urgent need to take a long-term view on AIDS. Achieving an AIDS Transition is thought-provoking and provides an important contribution to this vital debate.”

— Peter Piot, former executive director of UNAIDS

Achieving an AIDS Transition

Mead Over CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

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Achieving an AIDS Transition

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PRAISE FOR

Achieving an AIDS Transition “Mead Over proposes a canny model for marshaling and coordinating donor contributions to AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries. Achieving an AIDS Transition includes prudent and detailed plans that promise to bring us all closer to a transition long overdue.”

PAUL FARMER, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard University, and co-founder of Partners in Health

“Living with AIDS is clearly better than dying with AIDS. But the best outcome is to return to an AIDS-free world. Achieving an AIDS Transition provides the essential foundation for understanding the transition.”

PAUL COLLIER, director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, and author of The Bottom Billion

“There is an urgent need to take a long-term view on AIDS. Achieving an AIDS Transition is thought-provoking and provides an important contribution to this vital debate.”

PETER PIOT, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and former executive director of UNAIDS

“By examining the worldwide AIDS epidemic through the lens of economics, this book shows how donors and governments can look forward to the day when the burdens of AIDS and its treatment costs will be greatly reduced and increasingly affordable by national governments. I recommend this book to all who are looking for hard-headed analysis and a possible solution to the long-term sustainability of AIDS funding in severely affected countries.”

PROFESSOR SIR RICHARD FEACHEM, founding executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and executive director of Global Health Sciences, University of California–San Francisco

“I highly recommend this book to those particularly concerned with a shared responsibility of tackling the AIDS epidemic in Africa. As sufficient donor funds are going to be increasingly harder to come by in these challenging global financial times, this book seeks a fresh set of ideas on how realignment of incentives between donors and our African governments and citizens can move us closer to self-sufficiency.”

DAVID SERWADDA, former dean of the Makerere School of Public Health, Uganda

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“At last, an innovative approach to stemming the flow of new HIV infections. Mead Over brings to our attention the importance of the AIDS transition and offers a hard-hitting, incentive-driven approach to HIV prevention.”

MICHAEL MERSON, director of the Duke Global Health Institute and former director of the WHO Global Program on AIDS

“Mead Over is constructively provocative and someone whose thoughts deserve wide distribution and discussion.”

JIMMY KOLKER, chief of HIV/AIDS, UNICEF, and former deputy global AIDS coordinator, PEPFAR “Mead Over has proposed several ways that incentives can be used, at the national, local and individual levels, to improve the effectiveness of HIV prevention. His ideas are an important part of the global discussion as we search for innovative ways to sustain AIDS financing and slow the growth of the AIDS burden.”

DAVID WILSON, global AIDS program director, World Bank “Achieving an AIDS Transition gives hope to millions. This book is required reading for policymakers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in learning how the transition to a world free of AIDS can happen.”

GERMANO MWABU, professor of economics, University of Nairobi “Mead Over is one of the clearest thinkers in global health. He is also one of the few who has maintained an objective long-term view of the AIDS epidemic and, in stark contrast to many in the field, not shied away from articulating the consequences of inappropriate action.”

RIFAT ATUN, professor of international health management, Imperial College London, and director of the Strategy, Performance, and Evaluation Cluster, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

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Achieving an AIDS Transition Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment Mead Over

center for global development Washington, D.C.

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Copyright © 2011

Center for Global Development 1800 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 www.cgdev.org

Achieving an AIDS Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment may be ordered from: BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS c/o HFS, P.O. Box 50370, Baltimore, MD 21211-4370 Tel.: 800/537-5487; 410/516-6956; Fax: 410/516-6998; Internet: www.brookings.edu All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Center for Global Development.

CGD is grateful for contributions from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Over, A. Mead.

Achieving an AIDS transition : preventing infections to sustain treatment / Mead Over. p.; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-933286-38-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-933286-62-4 (e-book) 1. AIDS (Disease)—Prevention. I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. HIV Infections—prevention & control.

2. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome—prevention & control. WC 503.6] RC607.A26O93 2011 616.97’92—dc22 2011000619 987654321 Printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Sabon and Myriad Composition by R. Lynn Rivenbark Macon, Georgia Printed by R. R. Donnelley Harrisonburg, Virginia Cover photo: AIDS orphans in the Biwi/Mchesi area of Lilongwe, Malawi. Some rights reserved by Flickr user khym54 under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

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1 Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1

The Global AIDS Transition: A Feasible Objective for AIDS Policy

Timing and Costs of an AIDS Transition in Africa

2 12 17

Rethinking AIDS Assistance to Facilitate an AIDS Transition

28

Defining an “AIDS Transition” Harbingers of an AIDS Transition

2

1

Using Incentives to Prevent HIV Infections With Appropriate Incentives, HIV Prevention Can Work Using Performance-Based Incentives for HIV Prevention Counting the Saved: A “Cash-on-Delivery” Approach to HIV/AIDS Assistance Potential Fiscal Savings from Better Prevention

vii

33 34 39 58 77

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viii CONTENTS

3

Sustaining and Leveraging AIDS Treatment Donor-Supported AIDS Treatment: The First International Entitlement AIDS Treatment Successes and Failures The Future Fiscal Burden of Treatment The Rationing Dilemma: Who Gets a Seat in the Lifeboat?

Indirect Effects of AIDS Treatment Ensuring HIV Prevention through Better Treatment

80 80 85 99 108 111 115

Appendixes A B C

Alternative Approaches to Estimating the Average Cost of Antiretroviral Treatment

123

A Meta-Analysis of the Health Benefits of Early Initiation of Antiretroviral Therapy

126

A Model for Projecting Future AIDS Treatment Costs

130

Notes

135

References

147

Index

159

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Preface

C

an an economist’s perspective help to justify greater expenditure on controlling the AIDS epidemic? When the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, the first head of the Global Program on AIDS, approached me at the World Bank in 1987 with that question, I had only an inkling of how big a problem AIDS would become for the developing world in general and for Africa in particular. Nor could I imagine that donors would spend so many billions of dollars on AIDS—only to see the need for money grow even faster.

At a 2005 summit conference in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G-8 leaders, perhaps encouraged by the billions of dollars newly authorized by the United States to fund the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), pledged to assure universal access to AIDS treatment by 2010.

But after years of double-digit increases reaching a high of $7.7 billion dollars in 2008, donor disbursements for AIDS stabilized in 2009 at $7.6 billion and are unlikely to increase in the next few years. This scaling back in donor ambitions is happening despite the continued increase of the number of people living with HIV/AIDS, which in 2010 surpassed 33 million.

One possible future is that donors will turn away from AIDS, reducing their budget allocations and expenditures year-by-year. Under this scenario, the grand humanitarian commitments to vanquish AIDS in poor countries will be gradually and quietly abandoned—just as the goal of malaria eradication was abandoned a few decades ago. ix

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x PREFACE

That would be a tragedy. Failure in the struggle against AIDS at this point would spread despair among the people suffering from HIV infection and their families. A failure of AIDS assistance would also have implications for foreign assistance more generally. The taxpayers in rich countries would be justified in asking why the foreign policy elite have failed to accomplish their stated goal of universal access to AIDS treatment. Was it because meeting the needs of poor people in poor countries is a reckless and foolish ambition—that we will always have poverty and disease? Will that reinforce the suspicion that foreign aid cannot be counted on for results— with potentially tragic consequences for the future of millions who could be helped by aid-financed programs?

In this book, Mead Over, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development since 2006, former Peace Corps volunteer, economics professor at Williams College and Boston University, World Bank economist, and one of world’s leading economic specialists on the AIDS epidemic, presents a vision for a “win” on AIDS policy—a hopeful alternative to the abandonment that otherwise might lie ahead. His controversial but realistic proposal is that AIDS prevention be the horse that pulls the cart, generating an “AIDS transition” analogous to the demographic transition donors successfully supported three decades ago in the developing world. He lays out, among other approaches to prevention, the logic and the implication of using some portion of AIDS funding to pay governments directly for measured reductions in the incidence of new HIV infections.

Getting to the AIDS transition, the milestone after which the number of people living with HIV/AIDS begins to decline, does not itself constitute a “win” against this devastating epidemic. But it’s a stepping-stone to that objective, which if explicitly sought, will help donors and governments justify continued expenditure in the short run and to plan reasonably and confidently for the end of both the depredation and the burden of this scourge. nancy birdsall President Center for Global Development

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Acknowledgments

T

his book is the distillation of twenty-five years of work on the economics of AIDS, so my debts of gratitude extend deep into the past and far across the world.

First, I thank Jonathan Mann, whose 1987 request to the World Bank for technical assistance in estimating the economic impact of AIDS led him to invite me to spend three years working with the Global Programme on AIDS, the ancestor of UNAIDS, on the economic impact of the AIDS epidemic. I thank Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development and the author of the preface to this book, who was then the chief of the health economics research unit at the World Bank, for designating me then to work on the topic and for supporting my work on this book here at the CGD since my arrival.

Thanks to my World Bank supervisors, Ann Hamilton, Anthony Measham, Dean Jamison, Emmanuel Jimenez, Paul Collier, David Wheeler, Zmarak Shalizi, and Ritva Reinikka, who supported my AIDS economics work at the World Bank. There, under the insightful supervision of Lyn Squire, I had the pleasure of applying the economics lens to AIDS with my good friend and colleague Martha Ainsworth as we produced Confronting AIDS: Public Priorities in a Global Epidemic. I appreciate the continuing collaboration and support over the years from current and former World Bank colleagues Nicholas Prescott, Jacques van der Gaag, Hans Binswanger, Lawrence MacDonald, Richard Skolnik, Miriam Schneidman, xi

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xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Timothy Johnston, Damien de Walque, Susan Stout, David Wilson, Robert Oelrichs, Jody Kusek, William McGreevey, and Phil Musgrove.

Tanzanian research collaborators Phare Mujinja, Godlike Koda, George Lwihula, and Innocent Semali and project manager Tom Wayman taught me about how households cope with AIDS. Thanks to Peter Piot, King Holmes, James Chin, Nancy Padian, Sevgi Aral, Geoffrey Garnett, Timothy Hallett, and Julian Gold for introducing me to the complexities of HIV prevention, HIV epidemiological modeling, and antiretroviral therapy.

I appreciate the opportunity offered me by Jacky Mathonnet and Martine Audibert to try out my ideas and models on their students in their master’s program in health economics at the University of the Auvergne. And thanks to Stefano Bertozzi, Hnin Hnin Pyne, Julia Dayton, Indrani Gupta, Kathleen Beegle, Daniel Dorsainvil, Mattias Lundberg, Emiko Masaki, Martina Tonizzo, Owen McCarthy, and Tejaswi Velayudhan, who over the years have helped me struggle not only with the conceptual puzzles arising out of the substance of the work, but also with Stata, data, and manuscripts.

I’ve benefited greatly from the views of CGD’s global health experts— Ruth Levine, Rachel Nugent, Nandini Oomman, William Savedoff, and Amanda Glassman—as well as experts on other development topics. I appreciate the critical perspectives on my work offered by Angus Deaton, Anne Case, Charles Holmes, John Blandford, Greg Gonsalves, David Barr, and Jimmy Kolker, though I have not always been convinced by their arguments. Additional thanks go to John Osterman and Laura Wallace, who supported the production of this book in its last stages. I am grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its financial support of this work.

And special thanks to my wife, Elizabeth King, and my daughters, Alexandra and Veronica, who have tolerated my business trips and listened with appropriate skepticism to my latest theories for so many years on the same topic. I hope that my daughters will see AIDS transitions become commonplace in country after country around the world, so that the scourge of this disease finally disappears from the planet.

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Achieving an AIDS Transition

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CHAPTER

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1 The Global AIDS Transition: A Feasible Objective for AIDS Policy

A

bout 1.8 million people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2009; 1.6 million were adults in the prime of life. 1 Meanwhile, about 2.6 million people were newly infected with HIV, thus increasing the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS by more than 750,000. 2 With 33.3 million people living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2009, the burden of this epidemic continues to grow with every passing year.

In this book, I propose a new paradigm for combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a new objective around which international donors and recipient governments can coordinate their efforts. I call this objective the “AIDS transition.” In this chapter, I define the AIDS transition and show how adopting it as an objective can eventually eliminate the burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the world. In the second chapter, I address the challenge of reducing new HIV infections sufficiently to bring about an AIDS transition. Recognizing the accumulating burden of supporting AIDS patients in low-income countries, I consider in the third chapter how donors and governments can sustain the success of AIDS treatment at a pace that will prevent a resurgence of AIDS deaths.

What exactly is an “AIDS transition”? It is a dynamic process that preserves recently achieved AIDS mortality reductions while lowering the number of new infections even further so that the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS diminishes. Once the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS begins to decline in a country, access to universal treatment 1

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2 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

will get closer to becoming a reality every passing year—instead of receding as it has recently. And a future without AIDS will become a reasonable goal instead of the fantasy it seems today.

Here I first define the AIDS transition in more detail, comparing it to the demographic transition that played a prominent role in development during the twentieth century. I find harbingers of an AIDS transition in the recent epidemiological trends reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. I provide calculations of when and how the transition might occur, and I conclude by discussing policy opportunities that emerge from the AIDS transition perspective.

Defining an “AIDS Transition” As the third decade of the AIDS epidemic marches on, remarkable successes at extending treatment to millions and a few signs of progress in prevention are overshadowed by a single stark statistic: for every person placed on AIDS treatment in 2009, about two new HIV cases arose.3 Thus, the epidemic continues to spread faster than it can be prevented or treated through the combined efforts of all donors.

In view of the extraordinary rate at which AIDS patients in low- and middle-income countries have enrolled in antiretroviral therapy (ART) programs since 2003—from less than 100,000 in 2003 to more 6 million at the end of 2010—an optimist might see the continued excess of new infections over new enrollments as a temporary phenomenon. But this view ignores not only the swelling human cost of the increasing numbers of people dependent on a daily drug for survival, but also the fiscal implications, which are even less sustainable given the worsened financial environment that has resulted from the global economic crisis. For the United States, which provides about half of all donor support to AIDS treatment through its President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the cost of treating all who need it in the fifteen original target countries would absorb half of U.S. foreign assistance funds by the year 2016 (Over 2009b). Since limited foreign assistance resources in the United States and other countries also will be needed for other foreign policy objectives, now is the time to reframe the challenge presented by the global AIDS epidemic.

This chapter proposes a new paradigm for combating AIDS, one focused on sustaining an AIDS transition, which will occur in two phases. The first milestone is when the number of new HIV/AIDS infections in a country’s

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 3

population falls below the number of deaths from AIDS, so that the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS begins to fall. But if new infections are only slightly fewer than deaths, the total number of people with AIDS will fall very slowly. Backsliding on prevention or improved treatment technology could reverse the situation a year later. As a result, the AIDS transition truly will be consolidated only after the number of new infections is kept below continually suppressed AIDS deaths for about a decade. Only then will the number of people living with HIV/AIDS decline enough so that the disease takes its place among treatable chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

The development and deployment of an effective vaccine to prevent new infections would shorten dramatically the road to an AIDS transition. But three decades of experience have shown that HIV poses an extraordinarily difficult challenge to the immune system and to those who would prepare a vaccine to fend off the virus. Time and again, the goal of an effective vaccine has appeared within reach, only to vanish like a mirage as we have ap proached. That said, researchers must continue to pursue this elusive goal, and if we are lucky, their findings will yield biological insights that also will benefit other diseases.

For the foreseeable future, however, HIV prevention will depend on solving the social problem arising from the simple fact that for many people, the individual threat of developing AIDS—because it is uncertain and would only occur years later—seems insufficient to counterbalance the immediate rewards from unprotected sexual intercourse and needle-sharing intravenous drug use, which drive the epidemic (see box 1-1). These risks, taken by individuals, impose massive costs on the entire society in the form of a fiscal burden, medical dependency, and an increased threat of future infection to every sexually maturing young adult—indeed, to children everywhere. We all need to work together to ensure an AIDS transition through available interventions, without depending on a vaccine discovery that may never occur.4 Figure 1-1 helps us visualize the history of AIDS with a stylized version of the AIDS epidemic in a typical highly affected country. The solid lines in both panels represent the past, and the dashed lines represent the hoped-for future. When the epidemic began, the number of new infections was greater than the number of deaths of AIDS patients (see panel a), reflecting the fact that many years usually pass before HIV-infected individuals become sick and die. This led to a rapidly rising number of people with HIV/AIDS (panel b). As the epidemic matured, the annual number of

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BOX 1-1.

A Snapshot of AIDS Treatment

Because HIV is a retrovirus, it can only be treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART). To combat drug resistance, this medication is typically dispensed as a mixture of three different drugs, called combination or triple-drug therapy. The price of first-line ART has fallen dramatically over the years and is now available as a low-cost generic drug—heavily subsidized in the developing world by foreign donors. The tricky part of the treatment is that the drugs must be taken every day, and sometimes several times a day, for the rest of the patient’s life. If the patient fails to adhere closely to the prescribed timing and dosages, a drug-resistant strain of HIV will develop. At that point, the patient will either die within months or shift to a new and typically much more expensive drug or combination of drugs known as second-line treatment. This treatment is not available in a generic form or funded by donors.

At what point are HIV-infected patients supposed to begin taking ART? In contrast to most other infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS takes years to make a person sick. The time from infection to illness is typically about eight years but can vary from five to twelve years or more. Once a patient begins first-line therapy, he or she can postpone mortality by four to ten years. If first-line therapy fails, second-line treatment can postpone mortality for another two to ten years.

A key measure of the progression of HIV is the number of CD4 cells per microliter of the patient’s blood, a count that declines from nearly 1,000 for uninfected people to zero as the person’s immune system is destroyed by HIV. Until recently, the World Health Organization recommended that patients begin treatment for AIDS once their cell count reaches 200 cells per microliter, or about eight years after becoming infected. In 2009, however, the organization revised its guidelines, recommending that treatment begin a year or more earlier, when the CD4 count has dropped to 350 cells per microliter of blood (WHO 2009).

These guidelines will be very expensive to adopt. Although the number receiving subsidized AIDS treatment in low- and middleincome countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, has risen from a few thousand people in 2003 to about 6 million in 2010, about 57 percent of those in need are going untreated. At the 350 threshold, current coverage would drop to a dismal 30–40 percent, a far cry from the global community’s goal of universal coverage.

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F I G U R E 1 - 1 . Achieving an AIDS Transition: A Milestone on the Road to a World without AIDS Panel A. Annual infections and deaths

Number of people per year

New infections AIDS deaths

HIV spreads before deaths are numerous

Effective treatment decreases number of deaths

Effective prevention decreases infection rate

Transition achieved

Transition consolidated

New infections slow but deaths mount

Today

Time Transition achieved

Total number of people living with AIDS

Panel B. Total infections

Transition consolidated

Today

Time Source: Author’s construction.

new infections (the incidence of HIV) did not change very much, but the annual number of deaths eventually rose almost as high, slowing the rate of growth of the population living with AIDS (the prevalence of HIV/AIDS).5 Then, beginning in 2000, an increasing proportion of AIDS patients started ART, which began to slow the number of deaths. At the same time, the annual number of new infections declined slowly because prevention efforts were insufficient and ineffective. The result has been a dramatic rise in the number of people living with HIV/AIDS. If we do not change our approach, the gap between these two flows—AIDS patients dying and new individuals becoming infected—will continue to widen, producing a “population explosion” of AIDS patients.

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What can be done? The goal should be twofold: (1) to suppress the annual number of deaths by continued access to effective treatment; and (2) to reduce the annual number of new infections over the next few years by effective HIV prevention. As figure 1-1 shows, when a country succeeds in pushing new infections down below the number of annual deaths, it will succeed in achieving the first AIDS transition milestone. And after many years of further efforts to sustain access to quality treatment and suppress new infections, the total number of people with HIV/AIDS will decline to levels not seen since the beginning of the epidemic. At that point, the country will have consolidated its AIDS transition, and universal access to AIDS treatment will be financially feasible for even the poorest countries.

But neither the decades-old origin of the AIDS epidemic nor the decadesin-the-future eventual consolidation of the AIDS transition are of as much interest to us today as the immediate future. Figure 1-2 focuses on the timeslice of figure 1-1 starting a few years ago, when effective AIDS treatment began to reduce annual deaths, and then extends to only a few years from now, when we might reach the attainable milestone of the AIDS transition.

The figure emphasizes that if the AIDS transition succeeds, the current surge of people living with HIV/AIDS will be temporary, slowing when annual numbers of new infections decline. In the year when new infections first fall below the annual number of deaths, the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS will have peaked, and the focus will turn toward consolidating the transition.

A Dynamic Transition The AIDS transition has commonalities with another transition in the history of public health: the demographic transition, when a largely rural agrarian society with high fertility and mortality rates shifted to a predominantly urban industrial society with low fertility and mortality rates (Thompson 1929; Coale 1973; Hammer and others 2008). 6 Both transitions are dynamic processes with great momentum; they begin with a threatening “population explosion” because of declining mortality; and stopping them requires slowing the trend that fuels that explosion (reducing births in the case of population and infections in the case of AIDS).

Neither is amenable to a quick fix—averting the explosions by allowing mortality to rise would have tragic human consequences and generate politically unacceptable reputational risks for donors and perhaps governments (Over 2009b).

In the AIDS transition, dynamism is evident at many levels. For the population, risky behaviors that spread HIV ebb and flow in response not only

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F I G U R E 1 - 2 . The Number of Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Will Grow before a Transition Takes Hold

Number of people per year

Panel A. Annual infections and deaths

New infections AIDS deaths

Temporary surge of ART patients

Today

Time

Total number of people living with AIDS

Panel B. Total infections

Temporary surge of ART patients

Today

Time Source: Over 2004.

to population dynamics and economic growth patterns, but also to the changing perception of the riskiness of those behaviors. In turn, HIV transmission ebbs and flows in response to behavioral cycles. Within each patient, the billions of replicating virus particles surge, then ebb, then surge again as the virus fights a years-long war of attrition with the host’s immune

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system.7 Even society’s responses—including fear; denial; recognition; and policies to prevent, treat, and mitigate the disease’s impact—ebb and flow in response to changing political personalities, fluctuating donor fashions, new cohorts of youth coming of age, and the boom and bust of economic cycles.

That said, the AIDS transition and the demographic transition also have many differences. In the demographic transition, despite concerns about the pressure that a high birth rate puts on our limited resources, each individual baby is a cause for celebration. Furthermore, a population boom causes a bulge in the age distribution of many countries, which in turn contributes a “demographic gift” in the form of increased savings and faster economic growth when that wave of people enters the labor force (Bloom and Williamson 1998).

In contrast, a new case of HIV infection leads to pain, suffering, premature death, and serious economic consequences. Each additional AIDS patient treated with subsidized ART, no matter how successfully, will draw down national saving by the amount of his or her domestically financed treatment subsidy. Even patients who pay for their own care are diverting private resources away from consumption and investment, as well as scarce medical resources away from other competing health needs.

Moreover, in the demographic transition, as adults learn that their children are less likely to die in childhood, they desire fewer children. A decline in desired family size, if supported with family planning information and supplies, leads to a decline in birth rates.

But in the AIDS transition, the impact on new infections of AIDS treatment access and the consequently smaller number of deaths is more complicated and less clearly desirable. As table 1-1 shows, treatment has a mix of behavioral and biological effects. Just as awareness of lower childhood mortality reduces peoples’ fear that their children will die and thus gives them the confidence to plan fewer children, awareness of lower AIDS mortality has reduced peoples’ fear of knowing their HIV infection status and thus encouraged them to seek testing and treatment at an earlier stage of the disease. Effective treatment also reduces new infections by lowering the number of virus particles in bodily fluids, thereby reducing the rate of transmission associated with potential exposures.8 Unfortunately, pernicious effects in both the biological and the behavioral dimensions offset the desirable effects of treatment on the number of new infections. In the biological dimension, ART can select resistant strains of HIV, which can replicate in, and be spread by, ART patients (Friedland and Williams 1999; Bangsberg and others 2003). And because treatment

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T A B L E 1 - 1 . AIDS Treatment Affects HIV Transmission, but Not Always in a Good Way Effects that might slow transmission Biological

Behavioral

Effects that might speed transmission

Reduces viral load in the HIV-infected person, which reduces the infectivity of each sexual contact

Lengthens duration of infectivity, which increases number of contacts

Motivates HIV testing, but testing has an ambiguous impact on transmission

Reduces perceived danger of unsafe behavior, potentially leading to the “disinhibition” of risk behavior that had previously been inhibited by fear of AIDS.

Promotes solidarity and reduces the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS, which might facilitate prevention campaigns in some settings

Selects for resistant strains of HIV, which can be transmitted despite the presence of antiretroviral drugs

Source: Over and others 2004.

lengthens patients’ lives, it obviously lengthens the time during which these patients can infect others.

On the behavioral side, the increased HIV testing resulting from wider treatment access has been a mixed blessing for HIV prevention. People who have learned that they are HIV positive subsequently report reducing their risky sexual contacts. However, since they are aware that society expects this of them, their self-reported behavior might belie a less altruistic change in behavior in the other direction. On the other hand, people who test negative actually report an increase in risky behavior, especially if they have tested negative several times (Sherr and others 2007).9 Furthermore, the very effectiveness and accessibility of AIDS treatment naturally reduce peoples’ fear of the disease. Given that risky sex and intravenous drug use are inherently gratifying, people are rational to increase those behaviors in response to the perception that the consequences are less dangerous. Such perverse effects in association with AIDS treatment have occurred in various settings around the world, including Nairobi, Kenya, and several American and European cities (Miller and others 2000; Katz and others 2002). To quote UNAIDS, “HIV incidence appears to be either stable or on the rise in numerous countries where antiretroviral therapy has long been widely available” (WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009, p. 18).

Another way the two transitions differ is in whether economic development helps or hinders. Although the demographic transition is not yet complete in all parts of the world, population death rates have generally remained

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10 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

low, and birth rates have continued to decline. As countries urbanize, educate the female population, and improve the availability of family planning information and supplies, people seem to want to reduce their fertility rates to approximately replacement level. The momentum of development is clearly reinforcing government policy in the direction of a successful demographic transition.

In contrast, countries severely affected by AIDS have no perceptible development-related momentum for the AIDS transition. Although significantly suppressed by vigorous government- and donor-supported AIDS treatment programs in many low- and middle-income countries, AIDS mortality would bounce back up again within months if these subsidized programs were removed. And in low-income countries, the number of HIV infections shows no sign of declining “naturally” in response to expanded access to AIDS treatment (WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009).

Many Ways to Fail What are the chances of success with the AIDS transition? Sadly, they are uncertain at best. Granted, the spread of AIDS treatment has launched the first stage of AIDS transition in many countries, but the transition can fail just as ignobly as did the last century’s plan to eradicate malaria. In 1955 the WHO announced a worldwide Global Malaria Eradication Program, only to admit defeat in 1969 (Tanner and de Savigny 2008). Some forty years later, the Global Roll Back Malaria Program is gaining momentum—but notably without the word “eradication” in its title.

So what form might failure take? Three possible scenarios stand out in which the number of people living with HIV/AIDS would continue to grow unimpeded rather than eventually decrease, as illustrated in figure 1-1. One involves treatment failure, and all involve prevention failure. They all lead to ever-faster accumulations of the population undergoing treatment with ART until, by the arithmetic of compound interest, keeping them alive requires an ever-growing portion of the total resources of the health sector and then of society as a whole.

In the first scenario, donors and governments not only fail to reduce the number of newly infected individuals, but also fail to sustain the quality and the number of people recruited as new ART patients, which, in turn, influences the number of AIDS deaths. As a result, the current surge in the number living with HIV/AIDS would initially slow but then continue to grow. While the growth rate in the total number of people with HIV/AIDS would be slowest with this type of transition failure, the resurgence in AIDS mortality would resemble the resurgence of malaria deaths through-

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 11

out sub-Saharan Africa and Asia after the Global Malaria Eradication effort was terminated in 1969 (Packard 1997). The failure would be de pressing—even humiliating—and would discredit all involved with the effort to widen access to AIDS treatment.

In the second possible scenario, donors and governments sustain the quality and the number of people recruited as new ART patients, but they fail to slow the incidence of new infections. In this case, the continued “success” of treatment would lead inevitably to immense fatigue as donors and governments became overwhelmed with the burden of maintaining constantly growing numbers of people on treatment.

In the third scenario, donors and governments again sustain the quality and the number of people recruited as new ART patients but fail so miserably on the prevention front that the incidence of new infections actually rises. Among the three types of AIDS transition failure, this one would lead to the most explosive growth of people living with HIV/AIDS. It would occur if the net impact of AIDS treatment is to stimulate rather than depress HIV transmission.

Which of these scenarios is most likely to occur? Given the current slowdown in the availability of funding for AIDS treatment and the lack of progress toward effective HIV prevention, the most likely transition failure is the first scenario. If AIDS deaths eventually rise—which would reflect either a cessation of patient recruitment or a lowering of treatment standards—we can expect AIDS treatment providers, beneficiaries, and advocates to loudly blame one another and the rest of the foreign assistance community for this reversal. In the minds of tax-paying constituents in donor countries, the ensuing acrimony is likely to tarnish the entire AIDSassistance enterprise, reducing AIDS donors’ ability to fund AIDS treatment or prevention. Indeed, public disappointment with the reversal of the much-celebrated recent mortality reductions might engender the feeling that any kind of foreign assistance is ultimately hopeless, thus leading to a loss of public support for foreign assistance funding in general. For these reasons, the feasible objective of the AIDS transition benefits not only the AIDS community, but all those with an interest in the foreign assistance enterprise.

A New Policy Tool A new paradigm alone is no magic bullet for the AIDS epidemic. The litmus test of the paradigm will be whether it enables all policymakers—from national leaders to the municipal authorities, from heads of donor agencies to those who negotiate and implement project agreements—to integrate the

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12 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

twin goals of reducing mortality through treatment and preventing new infections. Any program that accomplishes one goal but not the other must be called to account. Only programs that work on both—and can show results on both—should be eligible for funding.

Harbingers of an AIDS Transition How far along is the global community on the AIDS transition? The answer is that the world as a whole—and sub-Saharan Africa in particular—is only in the initial stages.

As figure 1-3 shows, Africa is experiencing the most marked mortality reduction of any region in the world, characteristic of the beginning of an AIDS transition. Annual deaths declined from 1.6 million in 2005 to 1.4 million in 2008, a drop of 4.5 percent per year. This continent-wide average hides even greater declines in some countries. Between 2002 and 2006, AIDS mortality in Kenya fell by 29 percent, or at an annual rate of 7 percent per year (National AIDS Control Council 2007).

The mortality trend for Asia also looks hopeful, as India, the country with the most AIDS cases, rolls out AIDS treatment to an increasingly large percentage of those who need it. However, the annual number of AIDS deaths has not yet begun to decline in Latin America and continues to rise in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Although Brazil, Argentina, Poland, and a few other countries in these regions have taken great strides toward mortality reduction, the regions in aggregate have not yet achieved the mortality reductions that are the harbinger of the first stage of an AIDS transition.

On the prevention side—the other half of the transition story—subSaharan Africa and Asia accounted for 84 percent of the roughly 2.7 million new infections in 2008. Moreover, as table 1-2 shows, new HIV infections continue to exceed the number of deaths from AIDS in about 86 percent of the 97 developing countries for which we have estimates.10 In other words, these countries are only in the initial phase of an AIDS transition. The worry is whether and how quickly they will proceed to the next stage. Even such countries as Brazil, Mexico, and Senegal, which have some of the best HIV-prevention programs in the world, have not been able to lower the number of new infections below AIDS mortality. Other countries, including South Africa and Zambia, have achieved heroic expansion of ART access from 2007–2008 but have not shown evidence of better prevention.

The 15 percent of developing countries where AIDS deaths exceed new infections are worth noting (see table 1-3). Rwanda and Cambodia are in

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 13

F I G U R E 1 - 3 . Estimated Number of AIDS Deaths with and without Antiretroviral Therapy, 1996–2008 (thousands) Sub-Saharan Africa

Asia

2,000

500

1,600

400

1,200

300

800

200

400

100 0

0 1996

1999

2002

2005

1996

2008

1999

2002

2005

2008

Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Latin America 160

120 100

120 80 80

60 40

40 20 0

0 1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

No antiretroviral therapy At current levels of antiretroviral prophylaxis

Source: WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009.

the forefront of the AIDS transition. If they can sustain their 90 percent treatment coverage and hold incidence rates below lowered death rates, they may be the first countries to consolidate the transition. India, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso also seem to be on the way to consolidating the AIDS transition, for two reasons: they have made impressive reductions in incidence from previously much higher levels, and they have not expanded AIDS treatment as much as some other countries. It is critical that the incidence reductions be sustained as they strive to expand treatment coverage. In Uganda, the most frequently cited example of successful prevention, worrisome evidence shows that the rate of risky behavior and HIV infection in antenatal clinics are rising (Opio and others 2008; Guwatudde and others 2009). In Côte d’Ivoire, Myanmar, and Burundi, AIDS treatment coverage is so low at under one-third that their AIDS

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14 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

T A B L E 1 - 2 . Estimated New HIV Infections, AIDS Deaths, and Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) in Selected Countries where New Infections Exceed Deaths, 2007–08

Country

Estimated new HIV infections in 2007

South Africa Nigeria Kenya Zambia Ethiopia Thailand Vietnam Brazil Angola Colombia Namibia Swaziland Botswana Haiti

432,857 231,428 195,000 103,500 93,642 39,071 36,614 23,857 20,635 14,828 14,528 14,500 14,200 11,707

Deaths in 2007

Percentage of new infections that exceed deaths

Patients on ART in 2008

Percent increase in ART 2007–08

Estimated percent of coverage in 2008

350,000 170,000 107,500 56,000 67,000 30,000 24,000 15,000 11,000 9,800 5,100 10,000 11,000 7,200

23.7 36.1 81.4 84.8 39.8 30.2 52.6 59.0 87.6 51.3 184.9 45.0 29.1 62.6

701,000 239,000 243,000 226,000 132,000 180,000 27,100 190,000 13,000 23,100 59,000 32,700 117,000 19,300

52.4 20.7 37.3 49.7 46.7 17.6 59.4 5.0 8.3 10.0 13.5 30.8 25.8 28.7

39.3 29.5 43.6 59.9 39.2 69.5 34.0 79.5 23.0 39.1 82.5 51.5 95.0 47.6

Sources: Deaths in 2007 and pa tients on AR T are from UNAIDS 2008; WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009. Estima tes of incidenc e are computed by the author fr om The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health O rganization time series da ta on pr evalence, dea ths, and tr eatment r ollout b y c ountry. Estima ted c overage in 2008 is defined as the r atio of the number of 2008 AR T pa tients t o the sum of 2008 AR T pa tients and need in 2007, ac cording t o UNAIDS ’s 2007 methodology .

Selected c ountries ha ve a r atio of estima ted incidenc e t o deaths gr eater than 1.2, a r atio of enr olled ART pa tients t o the t otal number needing ART in 2007 greater than 0.25, and an estimated number of incident cases greater than 5,000.

deaths have not yet fallen below the rate of new infections. As they work to expand treatment coverage, they can prevent the surge in the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS by simultaneously improving prevention effectiveness. In this way, they can move more directly and immediately to consolidate an AIDS transition.

Uneasy Early Victories Another way to track progress on the AIDS transition is to step back and look at the time paths of new HIV infections since 1980. At first glance, the news from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa seems promising given that the number of new infections appears to be slightly declining (see figure 1-4). For the period 2001–2008, when accuracy might be highest, UNAIDS estimates that the declines in the number of new infections have been at the annual rate of 1.9 percent in Asia and 2.7 percent per year in Africa. Perhaps if these trends are simply sustained, the number of new infections will eventually fall below the number of annual deaths, and the number of people living with HIV/AIDS will begin to decline.

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 15

T A B L E 1 - 3 . Estimated New HIV Infections, AIDS Deaths, and Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) in All Countries where Deaths Exceed New Infections, 2007–2008

Country

Estimated new HIV infections in 2007

India Uganda Zimbabwe Cote d’Ivoire Myanmar Burundi Burkina Faso Rwanda Honduras Cambodia Djibouti Belarus Gambia

196,733 64,357 53,571 23,357 14,000 7,428 7,257 6,985 1,700 1,400 814 385 370

Deaths in 2007

Percentage of new infections that exceed deaths 1

Patients on ART in 2008

Percent increase in ART 2007–08

Estimated percent of coverage in 2008

213,677 77,000 140,000 38,000 25,000 11,000 9,200 7,800 1,900 6,900 1,100 1,100 401

–7.9 –16.4 –61.7 –38.5 –44.0 –32.5 –21.1 –10.4 –10.5 –79.7 –26.0 –65.0 –7.7

235,000 164,000 148,000 52,000 15,200 14,000 21,100 63,000 6,300 32,000 999 1,200 999

48.7 42.6 51.0 0.0 38.2 27.3 24.1 28.6 12.5 18.5 42.7 33.3 100.2

30.0 48.6 30.6 29.7 23.4 32.2 45.8 93.8 53.4 92.8 23.7 33.5 44.0

Sources: Columns with dea ths and pa tients on AR T are from UNAIDS 2008; WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009. Estima tes of incidence are computed by the author from The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health Organization time-series data on prevalence, deaths, and treatment rollout by country. Estimated coverage in 2008 is defined as the ratio of the number of 2008 ART patients to the sum of 2008 ART patients and need in 2007, according to UNAIDS’s 2007 methodology.

1. Negative numbers in c olumn three indicate that deaths exceed new infec tions.

For example, if Asia were to remain on its current trajectory, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in Asia would begin declining in 2015.

But given the continued dramatic expansion of ART in India, China, and Vietnam—and the likelihood that Thailand and Cambodia will sustain or even further expand treatment access—AIDS mortality is likely to fall even faster. By taking preemptive action on HIV prevention, the region can avoid an explosion in the number of people living with HIV/AIDS, moving more quickly to the consolidation stage, in which AIDS is a manageable, rarely infectious, chronic disease.

In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS mortality has been falling by 4.5 percent a year, more than twice as fast as the decline in new infections, creating a population explosion of people living with HIV/AIDS. Moreover, evidence shows that the incidence decline has slowed and perhaps even stabilized.

Determining what will happen next is difficult: debate continues over how much of the decline in incidence has been caused by changes in risk behavior as a result of government- and donor-funded prevention interventions— and how much would have occurred anyway owing to the natural evolutionary pattern of any infectious disease epidemic. For example, the massive

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16 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

F I G U R E 1 - 4 . Annual Incidence of New HIV Infections by Region, 1990–2008 (thousands) Sub-Saharan Africa

Asia 1,000

4,000

800

3,000

600 2,000 400 1,000

200 0

0 1990

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

1990

Latin America

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

Eastern Europe and Central Asia

250

400

200

300

150 200 100 100

50

0

0 1990

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

1990

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

2008

Average estimate High and low estimates

Source: WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2009.

expenditures of the PEPFAR program in Africa since 2003, while coinciding with the decline in mortality rate on that continent (figure 1-3), do not seem to have been associated with any traceable decline in new HIV infections (figure 1-4). While hardly strong evidence against the effectiveness of PEPFAR prevention efforts, this observation suggests that recent declines in HIV incidence might be cyclical and subject to reversal.

A recent study by Imperial College London’s Dr. Timothy Hallett and coauthors (2006) lends credence to the cyclical theory. Using detailed HIV surveillance data on specific countries, they extracted the estimated natural cyclical movement of the HIV epidemic in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Haiti and showed that in those countries, the annual number of new infections had fallen by more than plausibly could have been caused by the natural course of HIV. However, recent data from Uganda, where treatment coverage has expanded, suggest, as Alex Opio of the National AIDS Control Programme at the Ugandan Ministry of Health and others have argued, that both risk behavior and HIV prevalence rates are rising (Opio and others 2008). Thus,

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 17

it is necessary to consider the discouraging possibility that Africa’s incidence would stabilize at its current level, or even rise, as well as more optimistic futures in which it will continue to decline at 3 percent or more per year.

Timing and Costs of an AIDS Transition in Africa In contrast to most other infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS spreads slowly but with seemingly inexorable momentum. The time from infection to illness is typically about eight years, with individual durations varying from five to twelve years or more. In the absence of AIDS treatment, this long lag time means that preventing an HIV infection only averts death after a median time of about eight years. Since first-line AIDS treatment postpones mortality for the median patient by four to ten years (see box 1-1), its wide availability increases the lag between HIV prevention and averted death by this same number of years. When much more expensive second-line AIDS treatment is available for patients whose first-line therapy no longer works, mortality is postponed again.

Thus, HIV-prevention programs implemented in the next few years will generate most of their mortality-reducing benefits beginning twenty years in the future. Any analysis with a shorter outlook will undervalue the effect of HIV prevention now and in the immediate future. Other policy interventions with long-term impacts include changing the uptake rate of new AIDS patients or the criteria for AIDS treatment eligibility. In this book, in an effort to capture the benefits of HIV prevention and other AIDS policies with long duration, I use a planning horizon of 2050.

Quick, Slow, or Not At All When might an AIDS transition occur in sub-Saharan Africa? By projecting forward to the year 2050 the annual numbers of new HIV infections and AIDS deaths, one can estimate the number of years until an AIDS transition is achieved as a function of plausible rates of incidence decline and ART uptake. The three cases illustrated in figure 1-5 show differing speeds of incidence decline, from the number of new infections staying constant to a decline of 10 percent per year. 11 Each case has four possible future treatment-uptake scenarios. The uptake assumption—defined as the percentage of unmet need at the beginning of any year that is met during that year—varies from three to 80 percent.12 Case one (panel a) illustrates what would happen if the number of annual infections in sub-Saharan Africa remained constant at its current value of about 2 million new infections per year. With constant incidence,

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18 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

F I G U R E 1 - 5 . The Timing of an African AIDS Transition at Different Rates of New Infections and Treatment Panel A. Projected new infections and deaths if number of new infections stays constant

Panel B. Projected new infections and deaths if new infections decline at 3 percent per year 2.0

Millions of people

Millions of people

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0 2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

Panel C. Projected new infections and deaths if new infections decline at 10 percent per year

Millions of people

2.0

1.5 New infections

1.0

Deaths with 3 percent uptake 0.5

Deaths with 15 percent uptake Deaths with 40 percent uptake

0.0

Deaths with 80 percent uptake 2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

Source: Author’s computations.

even an uptake rate of 80 percent per year would be insufficient to suppress the number of AIDS deaths beyond 2020, and more than 1 million people per year would be added to the total eventually needing treatment.

At the other extreme, a policy with a 3 percent uptake rate would allow AIDS mortality to rise until it would equal the number of new cases in 2029. As a result, the explosive growth of the number of people living with HIV/AIDS would slow and then eventually reverse. But this “solution” to the problems of treatment success would reproduce for sub-Saharan Africa the breakdown described above as the first potential scenario of a failed transition. This result is akin to solving the problem of exploding population growth not with family planning, but by deliberately deploying the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 19

Case two reflects the more optimistic assumption that the rate of new infections continues to decline at about 3 percent per year, as it has for the last seven years (figure 1-5, panel b). But even with declining incidence, a policy that has only a 3 percent uptake rate would lead to a convergence of mortality and incidence—an outcome I define as a “transition failure” because it does not meet the condition of sustaining the reduction in AIDS mortality. But if the treatment uptake rate were 15 percent per year, AIDS mortality would remain roughly at the level successful treatment expansion achieves. Under this uptake rate, the continent would attain an AIDS transition in 2026. With more vigorous ART expansion at 40 percent or 80 percent, the AIDS transition would be attained in 2038 or 2043.

The sixteen-plus years it would take to achieve the transition in case two seems like too long to wait before turning the corner on the AIDS epidemic, especially given that decades of further expenditures on AIDS treatment would lie ahead and an uptake rate of 15 percent would leave 85 percent of patients without recourse in any year throughout this period. Case three represents what would happen with a more (perhaps excessively) optimistic 10 percent decline in the rate of new infections (panel c). With much more successful prevention and an uptake rate of 15 percent, the AIDS transition in sub-Saharan Africa could be attained in 2015. Even with much more ambitious uptake rates of 40 or 80 percent, the transition could be achieved by 2020 or 2025.

For any decline in new infections, the transition would be postponed by further expansions of access to treatment (panels b and c). Thus, while a faster rate of treatment expansion postpones death for millions, it greatly increases future costs and dependency levels. Donors and governments must carefully weigh the consequences when they expand treatment.

The AIDS Transition in Specific Country Contexts What would AIDS transitions look like for specific countries? Table 1-2 lists selected countries for which new infections appear to have occurred more often than deaths in 2007. Assuming that each country were able to attain a 3 percent annual decline in new HIV infections—a dramatic change from past experience in every case—we can calculate the future of the epidemic under alternate plans for treatment rollout to project the implication of that plan for achieving the AIDS transition.13 To illustrate the projections, let Nigeria and Mozambique represent Africa and Haiti represent the worst AIDS epidemic in the Western Hemisphere. Panel a in each of the next three figures presents for each country the temporal pattern of deaths, infections, and total number of people living

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20 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

with HIV/AIDS, showing whether uptake is sufficient to suppress mortality and, if so, the year the AIDS transition milestone would be met. Panel b shows the number of people receiving ART and the unmet need; panel c, the future cost to the public sector (donors and government) of this time pattern of AIDS treatment; and panel d, the total cost of AIDS treatment as a proportion of projected national health spending, total health spending, and total central government spending. Each figure projects these future quantities at the approximate historical yearly uptake rate in the respective country (top row) and at a much more ambitious uptake rate of 80 percent (bottom row).14 The incidence of new infections does not depend on the treatment uptake rate to avoid introducing additional assumptions.15 With an ART uptake rate of 15 percent per year, Nigeria (figure 1-6) could attain an AIDS transition by 2026 (panel a) at a cost that rises to $1.5 billion per year by 2050 (panel c) and hits a relative peak of 13 percent of its public health budget around 2018 (panel d). Mozambique (figure 1-7) could achieve a transition in 2029 with an uptake rate of 17 percent and a cost that rises to $900 million dollars and peaks relatively at 65 percent of its public health budget around 2021. Haiti (figure 1-8) has benefited greatly from the support of Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health.

Thanks to this assistance, the uptake is one of the highest among lowincome countries, recently attaining 27.4 percent of unmet need recruited each year. At that uptake rate, the transition would occur at 2033, with costs rising to $120 million per year and peaking relatively at 12 percent of its public health budget around 2018.

But the prospect that Haiti will divert up to 12 percent of its public health budget to AIDS treatment, as is necessary for an AIDS transition, seems dim for the next decade. I project that the share of ART in public health expenditures will decline thereafter, as it does in the other scenarios presented in this section, assuming that per capita growth in all countries in a region eventually will converge to the average per capita growth recently experienced in that region. Given Haiti’s decades of stagnation, one can hope—but not readily believe—that Haiti will pursue a growth path that eventually will allow it to finance AIDS treatment out of its own pocket. Clearly the achievement of an AIDS transition will make eventual self-sufficiency easier to imagine.

An uptake rate of 80 percent—far more ambitious than the historical uptake each country has achieved in recent years—would dramatically reduce AIDS deaths from now to 2050. For example, in Nigeria, the higher uptake rate would postpone almost 100,000 deaths a year by 2020, but those extra postponed deaths would cost billions of dollars that could be

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 21

spent elsewhere in the economy and also would delay the AIDS transition by 17 years. Mozambique will find it extremely challenging to finance ART for the million people who would receive it under a continuation of its 17 percent rate of uptake; an 80 percent uptake rate would extend ART to 2.5 million people, but it would quickly exceed the country’s total public health budget. In Haiti, the number of people dependent on AIDS treatment for survival would rise to about 200,000 by 2050 compared to 120,000 under the policy that continues the existing uptake rate. The cost burden in the year 2050 also would be 50 percent higher at $180 million a year instead of $120 million. The extra expenditure would avert about 3,000 deaths per year.

How to Make the Money Go Further How much would an AIDS transition in sub-Saharan Africa cost? A model that allows a look at many possible scenarios helps answer this question. Critical model assumptions include a 2050 projection horizon, which captures most benefits of prevention occurring in the next decade, and a conventional social discount rate of 3 percent.16 The future fiscal burden of a government or donor commitment to any given level of recruitment is estimated by assumptions about the unit cost of treatment in each country, the potential economies of scale as treatment numbers expand, the success rate of treatment, the proportion of patients moving from first- to second-line treatment, and other determinants. External donors bear most of these costs, except in a few middle-income countries, such as South Africa and Botswana, where the governments bear a substantial share.

The cost of an AIDS transition in sub-Saharan Africa depends on the uptake rate. A zero percent uptake rate would mean that those underwriting the treatment subsidies respect the entitlement of patients who have started subsidized treatment up to the present but assume no financial responsibility for additional patients.17 Using available data on the mortality of AIDS patients on treatment and assuming that second-line treatment rises to 95 percent coverage of the recruited patients who fail first-line treatment by the year 2020, about half of the 3.4 million patients currently on subsidized treatment in sub-Saharan Africa will still be alive in 2050, two-thirds of whom will be on second-line therapy. As figure 1-9 shows, the annual cost of this existing cohort starts at $2.5 billion in 2010, rises to $3.3 billion in 2028 as more patients switch to second-line therapy, then declines to $2.5 billion again in 2050 as mortality thins out the number of patients at the end of the projection period. Cumulating this annual cost over the forty years at a 3 percent discount rate yields a total present value (or

2010

2030

2030

2050

2.8

2040

2050

3

4

4

5

5

AIDS transition

2040

Number of AIDS deaths New HIV infections Number living with HIV/AIDS

2020

2020

Source: Author’s computations.

50

100

2010

2.9

3.0

3.1

3.2

3.3

0

1

2

3

4

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

2050

2050

Total number on ART Number on second-line ART Unmet need for ART

2020

2020

0.0

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

Total cost of ART Cost of second-line ART ART funding gap

2020

2020

2050

2050

Total cost of ART, cost of second-line treatment, and ART funding gap (billions USD)

0

10

20

30

0

5

10

15

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

2050

2050

ART as a % of total health expenditure ART as a %of central govt expenditure ART as a % of public health expenditure

2020

2020

Cost of treatment as percentage of projected national health spending, total health spending, and total central government spending

Panel D

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150

200

50

100

150

AIDS transition

Total number of people on ART, number on second-line ART and the unmet need (millions)

Number of new infections and deaths (thousands, left axis) and number living with HIV/AIDS (millions, right axis)

Panel C

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80 percent ART uptake

15 percent ART uptake

200

Panel B

Panel A

F I G U R E 1 - 6 . Nigeria: Characteristics of an AIDS Transition at 15 Percent Uptake and 80 Percent Uptake of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART)

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2010

2030

2040

2050

Number of AIDS deaths New HIV infections Number living with HIV/AIDS

2020

Source: Author’s computations.

0

50 1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

AIDS transition 3.5

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

2050

2050

Total number on ART Number on second-line ART Unmet need for ART

2020

2020

1.0

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

Total cost of ART Cost of second-line ART ART funding gap

2020

2020

2050

2050

Total cost of ART, cost of second-line treatment, and ART funding gap (billions USD)

0

50

100

150

0

20

40

60

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

2050

2050

ART as a % of total health expenditure ART as a % of central gov’t expenditure ART as a % of public health expenditure

2020

2020

Cost of treatment as percentage of projected national health spending, total health spending, and total central government spending

Panel D

10:38 AM

100

150

1.7

40 2050

1.8

60

2040

1.9

80

2030

2.0

100

2020

2.1

2.2

120

2010

AIDS transition

Total number of people on ART, number on second-line ART and the unmet need (millions)

Number of new infections and deaths (thousands, left axis) and number living with HIV/AIDS (millions, right axis)

Panel C

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80 percent ART uptake

17 percent ART uptake

140

Panel B

Panel A

F I G U R E 1 - 7 . Mozambique: Characteristics of an AIDS Transition at 17 Percent Uptake and 80 Percent Uptake of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART)

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2010

2030

2030

2050

140

2040

2050

2050

2050

200

0

150 0

Total number on ART Number on second-line ART Unmet need for ART

0

50

2040

2040

100

2030

2030

50

2020

2020

200 100

2010

2010

150

200

0

50

150

250

AIDS transition

2040

Number of AIDS deaths New HIV infections Number living with HIV/AIDS

2020

2020

50

100

150

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

Total cost of ART Cost of second-line ART ART funding gap

2020

2020

2050

2050

0

5

10

15

20

0

5

10

15

2010

2010

2030

2030

2040

2040

2050

2050

ART as a % of total health expenditure ART as a % of central gov’t expenditure ART as a % of public health expenditure

2020

2020

Cost of treatment as percentage of projected national health spending, total health spending, and total central government spending

Source: Author’s computations. Projections are based on the author’s AIDSCost model, described in appendix C. Instructions to download and operate the program are available at www.cgdev.org/aidscost.

2

4

6

2010

160

180 100

200 150

Total cost of ART, cost of second-line treatment, and ART funding gap (millions USD)

Panel D

10:38 AM

8

10

2

4

6

8

AIDS transition

Total number of people on ART, number on second-line ART and the unmet need (thousands)

Number of new infections and deaths (thousands, left axis) and number living with HIV/AIDS (thousands, right axis)

Panel C

7/11/11

80 percent ART uptake

27.4 percent ART uptake

10

Panel B

Panel A

F I G U R E 1 - 8 . Haiti: Characteristics of an AIDS Transition at 27.4 Percent Uptake and 80 Percent Uptake of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART)

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A FEASIBLE OBJEC TIVE FOR AIDS POLICY 25

F I G U R E 1 - 9 . Projected Annual Costs of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2010–50 Cumulative cost $488 billion

80 percent uptake

30

15 percent uptake

no new ART patients

Billions USD

Assumes that new infection rate is constant

20 $224 billion 10

$72 billion 0 2010

2020

2030

2040

2050

Source: Author’s calculations.

endowment equivalent) of $72 billion 2009 dollars.18 At a 3 percent interest rate, the annualized cost of this commitment would be $3 billion per year, which the international community approximately spent to subsidize AIDS treatment in low-income countries in 2009.19 Since a complete cessation of treatment recruitment seems unlikely and would allow AIDS mortality to rise—thus constituting a failure of the AIDS transition—figure 1-9 presents the timeline of costs for two other scenarios, each of which is defined by a constant uptake percentage. The middle line presents the future cost stream associated with funders’ commitment to continue recruiting 15 percent of those needing treatment, the rate at which the average sub-Saharan country recruited patients from 2006 to 2007.20 Because a few African countries have done much better than that, while most have done worse, a commitment to this objective might entail reallocating treatment subsidies away from countries that have recruited higher percentages to those that have done worse. Under this recruitment policy, and assuming that HIV incidence remains unchanged, figure 1-9 shows that annual treatment costs for the continent would rise from $3.3 billion now to about $12 billion by the year 2050. The total present value of the commitment would be $224 billion.21 At a 3 percent interest rate, the annualized cost of this commitment would be $10 billion per year, about three times the international community’s spending on treatment in 2009.

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26 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

A much more generous commitment to provide subsidized treatment for 80 percent of those who need it each year would near the humanitarian ideal of universal coverage for AIDS treatment. Under the same assumptions as before regarding treatment success, HIV incidence, and passage to second-line treatment—but allowing for some economies of scale as treatment numbers rise in individual countries—the annual cost of this commitment would rise above $30 billion in the year 2050. The total present value of the forty-year commitment would be $488 billion.22 At a 3 percent interest rate, the annualized cost of this commitment would be $21 billion per year, which is about seven times more than the international community spent on treatment in 2009.

Lowering Costs through Prevention Better prevention that helps bring down the rate of new infections will reduce the cost of achieving an AIDS transition. Figure1-10 shows that the total forty-year cost to donors and governments depends not only on commitments to patient enrollment (higher uptake rates), but also on the rate of incidence. The total present value of uptake commitments in the zero to 80 percent range is extremely sensitive to the effectiveness of HIV prevention on the continent. For example, if the annual number of new HIV infections in Africa remains unchanged at about 2 million per year, an 80 percent uptake costs a total of $488 billion (see point 1 in figure 1-10).

However, with the same ambitious uptake rate, if incidence declines at 3 percent per year, costs drop to $439 billion per year, saving $49 billion over forty years, or $2.1 billion a year (see point 2). We know from panel b of figure 1-5 that the same combination of 80 percent uptake and 3 percent decline in incidence would lead to an AIDS transition in 2043; it not only saves $49 billion, but also gets Africa to an AIDS transition.

If incidence falls by 10 percent per year, the savings at an 80 percent uptake amount to $113 billion ($488 billion minus $375 billion), bringing the annualized cost of nearly universal coverage down from $21 billion to $16.1 billion per year. With this rapid rate of incidence reduction, even with an uptake rate of 80 percent, Africa would get to an AIDS transition 18 years earlier than if incidence remained at current levels, in 2025.

By contrast, consider a pessimistic case in which the number of new cases rises by 3 percent per year. The endowment equivalent of the costs over forty years for an 80 percent uptake scenario rises to $568 billion, $80 billion more than if incidence remains constant and $193 billion more than if incidence declines by 10 percent over the period. Moreover, the AIDS transition will have failed.

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F I G U R E 1 - 1 0 . T otal Forty-Year AIDS Treatment Costs in Africa

by Treatment Uptake Rate and Incidence Rate, 2010–50 600

500

1

Billions USD (2009)

2

400

300 3

200 3 percent increase in incidence rate constant incidence rate

100

3 percent decrease in incidence rate 10 percent increase in incidence rate

0 0

20

40

60

80

Uptake as percentage of unmet treatment need Note: Future costs discounted at 3 percent Source: Author’s calculations.

Given that prodigious donor effort has been able to achieve no more than a 40 percent uptake rate for the sub-Saharan African region and now seems to be declining, it is worthwhile to focus on more affordable uptake rates. Suppose the financiers of AIDS treatment subsidies in Africa commit to meeting 15 percent of unmet treatment needed each year for the next 40 years, where “need” is defined as those having a CD4 count of less than 200.23 At constant incidence, this commitment amounts to an endowmentequivalent commitment of $225 billion (point 3 in figure 1-10). The same commitment costs only $200 billion if the number of new HIV cases declines at 3 percent per year and only $182 billion if it declines at 10 percent per year. On the other hand, if incidence increases by 3 percent per year, the total cost of this commitment is $252 billion.

These calculations underscore how a commitment to finance a given percentage of need defines an underwriter’s financial stake in HIV-prevention

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28 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

outcomes. The vertical distance between the upward sloping lines in figure 1-10 represents the impact of future prevention success on the forty-year cost of treatment. This vertical distance widens with higher uptake commitments. At an uptake rate of zero, funders have no stake in future prevention success. The larger the share of future need that underwriters commit to funding, the larger will be their stake in future prevention effectiveness.

Rethinking AIDS Assistance to Facilitate an AIDS Transition Now that the growth of HIV/AIDS funding seems to be slowing, it is a propitious time for the global community to adopt an objective that sets an upper bound on future funding and improves the incentives for prevention.

The goal of the AIDS transition would fill that role, but how likely is the global community to incorporate this objective into foreign aid policies?

The good news is that numerous trends in today’s global HIV/AIDS policy environment should facilitate this endeavor. These include: —increasing international impatience with poor HIV-prevention performance excused by issues of stigma or cultural barriers; —increasing recognition that donor support of AIDS treatment in lowincome countries constitutes an expensive international entitlement from which donors and governments can only withdraw over the long term by ensuring HIV prevention (Lyman and Wittels 2010); —increasing acceptance by donors that the eventual social development of the poorest countries depends on a long-term commitment to support their education- and health-sector achievements at levels consistent with an international humanitarian standard (as represented, for example, by the Millennium Development Goals); —increasing acceptance by donors and recipient countries that taxpayer and philanthropic support for social services in low-income countries will depend on transparent measurement of the results these services are in tended to deliver (Evaluation Gap Working Group 2006); —better technology for measuring the incidence of new HIV infections at the population level; —recognition by the international AIDS community that male circumcision is not only effective at reducing a man’s risk of infection but also may be acceptable among adult male populations in Africa; and —tentative acceptance by the international AIDS community that behavioral HIV prevention can be effective, although the “best practices” are highly context specific and thus must be developed and tested afresh in each national context.

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The challenge for the international health community is now to build on these trends to design a new AIDS transition strategy. The key to that strategy will be to leverage the political and economic support for providing ART to the largest possible number of patients. This will ensure not only sustained support for continued uptake of new ART patients at least at the global rate of 15 percent of unmet need each year, but also a dramatic deceleration in the rate of new HIV infections.

Changing Policy at Every Level The AIDS transition paradigm introduces an objective for each donor and national HIV/AIDS program. Programs will not be deemed successful unless they simultaneously suppress AIDS mortality and reduce the growth rate of the HIV/AIDS population. This objective will change assistance policy and practice at every level.

At the national level, an AIDS transition objective forces donors and governments to plan for AIDS treatment expansion only at the rate that evidence-based prevention programs demonstrate success in reducing incidence. The AIDS transition objective generates a demand for improved HIV-incidence measurement that will immediately expand the resources devoted to this essential task. Over the medium term, it will elicit entrepreneurial energy and biological breakthroughs to improve the technology for incidence measurement. To the extent that AIDS treatment can be shown to directly reduce HIV incidence in a given country, the scope for AIDS treatment will be expanded. But hard data must demonstrate such claims, not just mathematical models or self-reported behavioral change.

At the sub-national level, an AIDS transition objective involves local policymakers, who will be asked to show how existing HIV/AIDS treatment programs can be leveraged to improve prevention. For example, treatment programs can be required to form either an HIV-prevention arm that extends to the local community of uninfected people or a partnership with an agency specialized in results-based HIV prevention in such a population. Since budgetary constraints for supporting AIDS patients are typically national, there is scope for “trade” in AIDS treatment slots, so that sub-national districts, provinces, or programs that effectively demonstrate prevention success can give allotted treatment slots to less successful regions—perhaps in return for additional support for their malaria or maternal mortality programs. Such an internal “market” would reallocate resources to treatment and prevention efforts that effectively reduce incidence until the AIDS transition objective is satisfied.24

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30 THE GLOBAL AIDS TRANSITION

At the level of the individual patient receiving subsidized ART, those healthy enough to return to the labor force can be asked to contribute one day a month to HIV prevention in their community. Treatment programs can require patients to be members of support groups that function not only to help the patient adhere to the ART regime and regain or sustain good health as is currently done in many locales, but also to design and implement evidence-based HIV-prevention programs in local communities.

People suffering from AIDS and their advocates may object to the AIDS transition paradigm because it conditions some AIDS treatment expenditures on measured prevention success, thereby holding AIDS patients hostage to the performance of HIV-prevention programs and ultimately to the risk behavior in the community. The morality of this argument would be somewhat more compelling if financial and human resources were sufficient to treat an unlimited number of patients. However, with budget shortfalls and belt-tightening everywhere in the current environment, AIDS treatment resources will be rationed whether we like it or not. Without incidence declines, rationing will be even more severe in the future than in the present. More than ever before, AIDS treatment programs are being asked to demonstrate their efficiency. AIDS treatment advocates can increase the resources allocated to AIDS treatment if they concede the need to ensure a net decline in people living with HIV/AIDS and work actively to measure and publicize their progress toward this objective.

How PEPFAR Fits In The 2008 reauthorization bill for PEPFAR contains an example of exactly this kind of bargain in the form of a requirement on the program.

The bill mandates that the program annually report the unit costs of AIDS treatment over time. It further specifies that the number of people on treatment must be increased commensurate with the decline in the unit cost of treatment, so that the authorized treatment budget can be spread over more and more patients. This may be the first time in history that any government has mandated performance targets based on estimates of the unit costs of meeting those targets.25 Because U.S. authorization legislation sets an upper limit on the amount that subsequent appropriation bills can allocate to a program, the bill’s authors were constrained to seek efficiency through unit cost reductions.

The language of the bill gives AIDS treatment advocates an incentive to innovate in the management of treatment delivery systems in search of lower unit costs.

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An alternative procedure more in keeping with the AIDS transition objective is for a donor to “authorize” its agents not only to continue to treat current patients, but also to recruit a specified share of all those who need treatment in each future year through, for example, 2050. To this end, in its December 2009 strategy document, the United States committed to expanding the number of AIDS patients who will receive U.S.-funded ART from 2.4 million to at least 4 million patients by 2014. At the same time, it promised to put greater emphasis on HIV prevention and, specifically, to prevent 12 million infections.26 However, it would have been preferable to make the treatment commitment in the form of a specific percentage share of treatment need rather than as a specific number of patients, so the donor and its agents could share not only the burden of future patients but also the fiscal saving from effective prevention.27 Once it becomes apparent that the donor shares the gains from effective prevention, the donor can offer the recipient government an intertemporal trade. Under the specified assumptions on unit costs and the incidence of new infections, the future stream of these treatment costs can be estimated. For sub-Saharan Africa, the total cost of that commitment will be a great deal less if HIV incidence is reduced, as shown in figure 1-10, panels a and b. This reduction will save resources in the future, but those resources are not currently available to expand treatment rolls. A valuable role for donors is to solve this time-inconsistency problem by making a contract with the recipient country. As the recipient country presents hard evidence that HIV incidence is declining, it immediately can use a portion of the present value of the consequent savings in treatment costs to increase the current expansion of treatment access.

In the U.S. case, Congress can mandate an increase in the uptake of new patients that will hold constant the U.S. total long-term financial commitment to treatment. Such a mandate would force PEPFAR and recipient governments to measure incidence much more rigorously than they have yet done, and it also would channel political pressure for faster ART uptake toward achieving measurable reductions of HIV incidence on the ground in developing countries.

The troublesome aspect of the new PEPFAR strategy is that treatment and prevention objectives are separate. PEPFAR agents—who number in the thousands and range from in-country program staff and civil servants to contractors and NGOs—typically work on either treatment or prevention, but not on both. As a result, no one checks to see if prevention effort and success are sufficient to eventually offset the addition of more patients

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to the treatment rolls. It is true that both prevention and treatment would contribute to the achievement of the AIDS transition. But by failing to link them, the United States and other donors like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have missed a strategic opportunity to structure their AIDS assistance in a way that would more effectively motivate their agents to work toward an AIDS transition, thereby advancing the day when AIDS is a relatively rare and manageable chronic disease.

Chapter 2 is not included in this preview

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3 Sustaining and Leveraging AIDS Treatment

T

he international donor community has succeeded in supporting a vast expansion of subsidized AIDS treatment, with service to a few thousand patients in 2003 growing to approximately 6 million in 2010. These patients are the beneficiaries of the first international entitlement program. Like its domestic counterparts, the AIDS treatment entitlement engenders dependency among its beneficiaries and restricts the flexibility of the donors and governments that assume its burden. This chapter presents original estimates of the magnitude of the future fiscal burden of AIDS treatment under alternative assumptions about treatment quality and expansion, then proposes policy options to harmonize the incentives among donors, recipient governments, and AIDS patients to sustain treatment quality while leveraging treatment demand for the prevention of future cases.

Donor-Supported AIDS Treatment: The First International Entitlement At the 2005 summit meeting of the Group of Eight (G-8) in Gleneagles, Scotland, the assembled heads of state pledged “to develop and implement a package for HIV prevention, treatment and care, with the aim of as close as possible to universal access to treatment for all those who need it by 2010.” They also promised, “We will work to meet the financing needs for HIV/AIDS.”1 80

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But when the International AIDS Society—a professional organization whose members include AIDS researchers and patients—convened in November 2009, it reflected on this commitment, stating, “Five years later, major donors and domestic governments appear to be pulling back on this commitment. While significant progress has been made toward expanding access to HIV prevention and treatment since 2005, the universal access goal is far from being met” (International AIDS Society 2009, 1, emphasis added).

The “significant progress” is the huge rise in the number of patients receiving subsidized AIDS treatment in low- and middle-income countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 6 million patients receiving treatment by the end of 2010, about 3.2 million are supported by the U.S. President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).2 Thanks to this unprecedented international effort, the percentage of those needing and receiving treatment increased from less than 5 percent in 2003 to about 36 percent in 2009.

Unfortunately, although the term “universal access” has been defined in many ways—ranging from 100 percent to 80 percent coverage—all observers agree that 36 percent falls far short of that goal. Complicating matters, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced new guidelines that increased by 44 percent the number of people defined as “needing treatment,” thus reducing the coverage rate from a hopeful 52 percent to a dismal 36 percent.3 The attempt to provide treatment to all who need it looks more and more like the labor of Sisyphus, to whom the Greek gods set the task of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom each time it got close.

But just when it seems that AIDS treatment requires even more funding if it is to reach all those in need, donors indeed are “pulling back” from their 2005 universal treatment commitment. Consider the case of PEPFAR. The bill to reauthorize the program passed Congress in 2008, before the end of President Bush’s second term. That bill authorized $63 billion in new spending from 2009 through 2014, of which $39 billion is for HIV/AIDS treatment. Figure 3-1 shows the growth of PEPFAR funding for AIDS as enacted

by Congress from 2004 through 2010 and as requested by the Obama administration for 2011. The uppermost line shows the total amount for bilateral AIDS support. The second line displays the minimum amount that Congress required PEPFAR to spend on AIDS treatment.4 The rapid growth of U.S. funding for AIDS—at about 25 percent per year through 2008—has halted since that date, and the minimum amount mandated for treatment

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F I G U R E 3 - 1 . U.S. Funding for AIDS: Universal Treatment Is Not on Track 7

6

Bilateral HIV/AIDS programs Minimum funding mandated for AIDS treatment Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

5.7 5.5

Billions USD

5

4

3

2.8

2.8

2 1.1

1

0 2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

1

2011

Source: U.S. P resident’s Emer gency Plan for AIDS Relief , “Making a differ ence: funding ,” fac t sheet , O ctober 2010, w ww. pepfar.gov/documents/organization/80161.pdf.

Note: F unding for 2004 thr ough 2010 w as enac ted b y C ongress; funding for 2011 has been r equested by the Obama administration.

has leveled. Other channels have not offset the plateau in United States bilateral funding for AIDS. The bottom line in figure 3-1 shows that U.S. funding for the Geneva-based, multilateral Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, for example, also has flattened in recent years.

As a result of its scaled-back commitment, the United States draws a sharp distinction between patients whose antiretroviral therapy (ART) it is currently supporting and those with equal need who have not yet enrolled in treatment at a U.S.-supported site. Supporting the first group is an existing commitment. For patients not yet on treatment, the U.S. government will seek assurances that it alone will not bear all the future costs.

Illustrating this view, on April 11, 2010, Farah Stockman of the Boston Globe quoted a letter from the U.S. embassy in Kampala, Uganda, to PEPFAR-supported AIDS treatment facilities in that country as saying, “While the U.S. government is committed to continuing treatment for those individuals already enrolled . . . funding for HIV programs is not

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SUSTAINING AND LEVERAGING AIDS TREATMENT 83

expected to increase in the near future. As a result, PEPFAR Uganda cannot continue to support scale-up of antiretroviral treatment without a plan from the Government of Uganda on how these patients will be sustained.”

According to Ambassador Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator and head of the PEPFAR program, the letter did not mean that U.S.-supported enrollment of new patients has stopped yet in Uganda. However, Stockman quotes him as saying, “People are struggling to find resources to honor the commitments we have made. . . . We’re not at a cap point yet. If it gets worse, we’ll have another discussion.”5 To the extent that donors and their constituents agree that continued treatment of those already receiving it is sacrosanct, donor-financed support of AIDS treatment in low-income countries has created a new kind of international “entitlement.” Although called an “emergency plan,” the U.S. PEPFAR initiative has already endured longer than most emergency programs, and unless the United States either abandons or hands over its patients to other funders, PEPFAR is likely to persist longer than most foreign assistance projects. As The Economist notes, The problem with AIDS is that the more successful you are at treating it, the more you end up paying. That is because, unlike malaria and tuberculosis, it is incurable. Once someone is infected with HIV, the virus that causes it, they will end up requiring treatment for life. Good news for drugmakers, but bad news for both the poor who make up the overwhelming majority of the [33 million] people infected and for the taxpayers of the rich world who will be expected to find much of the money.6 Although the donors are not required by law to continue AIDS treatment, as would be true for domestic entitlements like the U.S. Social Security program, I believe that the international community and the voting public in democratic countries will constrain donors from dropping patients from treatment rolls. As the largest national donor, the United States will be seen as particularly accountable for sustaining this life-giving therapy, especially in the fifteen original PEPFAR focus countries.7 Thus, AIDS treatment can be considered an entitlement, and all other types of international assistance financing, including for HIV prevention, become discretionary spending—that is, the money leftover in a budget after entitlements are funded (Over 2009b; Lyman and Wittels 2010).

From the donors’ perspective, the downside of growing entitlements—in the absence of a very large increase in the total aid budget—is that the proportion of discretionary spending in donors’ AIDS budgets will decline as

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donors place more patients on treatment. From the recipients’ side, the downside of entitlements is dependency. Those who receive entitlements typically become dependent on them, and never more starkly than in the case of expensive life-giving drugs. The extreme form of aid dependency that AIDS treatment represents may have medium- and long-term negative repercussions.8 Because support for AIDS treatment converts foreign assistance from discretionary to entitlement spending, past treatment expenditure has already locked the United States and the other donor countries into a new aid paradigm. Advocates point to the unmet need for care and call for everincreasing funding levels.9 To the extent that the international community heeds the advocates’ call for more resources, entitlement spending will greatly increase in the next few years. The increase will be absolute and, unless total assistance expands at the same phenomenal rate, as a share of total assistance.

Are voting taxpayers of the United States and other industrial countries ready for this new entitlement paradigm? Growing funding for AIDS treatment suggests this possibility. But there is reason for concern. Historically, when budgets expand less quickly than planned, growing entitlements often squeeze out discretionary programs. In the case of AIDS funding, the $50 billion a year requested by UNAIDS (The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS) from all donors to meet universal access to treatment and prevention could squeeze out spending on all eight of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which are aimed at boosting living standards worldwide.10 In the first chapter in this book, I propose a new framework for addressing the AIDS epidemic, which I call the AIDS transition. I define the AIDS transition as a dynamic process that preserves recently achieved mortality reductions while lowering the number of new infections even further so that the total number of people living with HIV/AIDS diminishes.

In this chapter, I discuss policy options for AIDS treatment that can sustain current patients on treatment while at the same time hastening the AIDS transition. In conformity with the view that current patients are entitled to continued treatment, none of the scenarios considers the possibility of reducing support for them. However, many other options are on the table. I project the cost of a range of new patient recruitment options, from enrolling no new patients to recruiting 80 percent of those in need according to the new WHO guidelines. I also contrast the cost of a policy that offers only the less expensive first-line therapy to the cost of a policy that puts patients on second-line therapy when first-line fails. And I show how a

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general move to initiate each patient’s treatment earlier in the course of the illness has benefits but also significant costs. In a world of scarce financial resources, all these options involve trade-offs between cost savings and years of healthy life for the patients. While the calculations presented cannot determine how to choose among the alternative policies, they can elucidate the foregone opportunities implied by any choice and thus help policymakers and their constituencies choose wisely.

AIDS Treatment Successes and Failures Several influential players have contributed to increase the number of people in low- and middle-income countries receiving ART from less than 100,000 in 2003 to approximately 6 million in 2010. Among those most responsible for this dramatic change are President Jacques Chirac of France and President George W. Bush of the United States.

From 1981, when the human immunodeficiency virus was discovered and identified as the cause of AIDS, until 1997, AIDS treatment was considered far too ineffective, complicated, and costly for governments or donors to fund in low- or even in middle-income countries. For example, in 1988, one year after the first antiretroviral drug, AZT, had been patented and before it was widely available, a global review of the cost of AIDS treatment found that a single patient-year of treatment cost $15,800 in Australia, $21,000 in France, $40,200 in Germany, $13,400–$46,000 in the United Kingdom, and $19,000–$147,000 in the United States—and rarely gave the patient more than a few months of healthy life (Scitovsky and Over 1988). In subsequent years, as medical research introduced new classes of drugs to directly attack the HIV retrovirus and the medical community accepted “triple-drug therapy,” the effectiveness of treatment dramatically improved, while its potential cost rose. In the mid-1990s, the government of Thailand evaluated the cost-effectiveness of the new therapeutic combinations and concluded that “providing free antiretroviral therapy for symptomatic HIV infection, even with cost sharing, was unaffordable for both the public sector and the majority of patients” (van Praag and Perriens 1996, 440; see also Prescott 1997).

Writing in 1996 and 1997 on the priorities for government and donor intervention in the AIDS epidemic, World Bank economist Martha Ainsworth and I recognized the human tragedy unfolding as AIDS deaths climbed in AIDS-affected countries. But we were persuaded that given the high costs and still-limited effectiveness of ART, spending $10,000– $20,000 per patient-year on treatment would alleviate much less of that

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Oklahoma State professor Harounan Kazianga, and I found evidence that the false belief that AIDS can be cured, perhaps engendered by improved access to AIDS treatment, seemed to increase men’s demand for risky sexual behavior (de Walque, Kazianga, and Over 2010).

Other than reducing their risk behavior, as some studies suggest might have happened, Africans may have attempted to protect themselves against AIDS by marrying earlier. Given that the trend away from extremely early marriage by African girls has been heralded as a mark of socioeconomic development with important benefits for children, it would be unfortunate if young women were responding to the AIDS threat by seeking safe haven in earlier marriage (Case 2009). This would be especially problematic if, as some contend, marriage were to increase the risk of HIV infection. Thus, a previously unnoticed benefit of effective treatment could be to reassure young women that they can remain single longer and thereby encourage a healthy postponement of marriage into the twenties.

TREATMENT INCREASES EXPOSURE TO AN INFECTED PERSON. Because ART typically prolongs the healthy life of an HIV-infected person by many years but does not cure AIDS, that person has more opportunity to infect others.

This biological effect of ART on exposure is more worrisome if the patient is not adhering perfectly to the medication and therefore not suppressing viral replication.

TREATMENT C AN SELEC T FOR RESIST ANT STR AINS OF HIV . In 2010 the WHO reported that 5–15 percent of a sample of fifty-two consecutively diagnosed HIV-positive women in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, were found to be carrying a drug-resistant strain (WHO, UNAIDS, and UNICEF 2010, 65). Since these women were between 15 and 24 years old, pregnant for the first time, and not yet on ART, they probably had contracted a drugresistant strain of HIV from a sexual partner. Because treating their strains of HIV requires immediate access to costly, harder-to-find, harder-tomanage second-line therapy, they will have a harder time initiating and adhering to treatment. If treatment had never been available in their community, any HIV they would have contracted would have been easier to treat. So the fact that treatment selects for resistant strains of HIV is a negative biological effect of treatment on prevention.

Ensuring HIV Prevention through Better Treatment In an ideal world, the accelerated expansion of access to AIDS treatment would somehow slow AIDS transmission, automatically extinguishing the epidemic. In such a world, there would be no tension between the immediate,

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palpable objective of treating sick people and the far-sighted, abstract objective of preventing HIV infections. The AIDS transition could be accomplished by investing solely in treatment expansion and allowing its beneficial effects on HIV prevention to work their magic. However, in the real world, the beneficial spillover effects of AIDS treatment on HIV prevention are offset by perverse spillovers and thus on balance do not appear to be sufficient to bring the annual number of new infections down below the annual death rate. In the absence of much more effective prevention, successful treatment expansion will indefinitely augment the number of people with AIDS treatment entitlements, forever postponing the date of an AIDS transition.

In chapter 2, I present some specific ideas for improving HIV prevention by the application of incentives. In this chapter, I present ideas for applying incentives in the domain of AIDS treatment, not only to improve its effectiveness, but also to strengthen the beneficial effects of AIDS treatment on HIV prevention. If we can design reward systems for AIDS treatment programs that align the incentives of all who benefit from them more perfectly with the interests of the governments and donors who are funding the AIDS programs, we will have pushed this world a little closer to a place where AIDS treatment unequivocally reduces new infections in the general population, thereby reducing future demands on the public purse and contributing to reducing its own burden.

Performance-Based Funding for AIDS Treatment A relatively new policy instrument for the health sector is the application of performance-based incentives (PBIs) to increase the productivity or improve the quality of health care. These incentives are defined as “the transfer of money or material goods conditional on taking a measurable action or achieving a predetermined performance target.” They include “incentives on both the demand and the supply sides, at both individual and collective levels, [which operate at] the interface between provider and patient.” But they exclude “the conditional payments that donor agencies offer to national [or sub-national] governments” (Eichler, Levine, and Performance-Based Incentives Working Group 2009, 6).32 Typical PBIs include conditional cash transfers, transportation subsidies, food support, and financial rewards to providers for results (or penalties for poor performance).

One country that has experimented with PBIs for health care delivery for many years is Rwanda (Eichler, Levine, and Performance-Based Incentives Working Group 2009, 189–214). In 2006, when it began to scale up PBIs to its entire health care delivery system, Rwanda decided to

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permit rigorous evaluation of the PBI approach, which had been under way since 2002. To do so, the government allocated PBI rewards to 79 of 165 facilities and withheld the reward system from 86 facilities. The assignment was partly random and partly based on matching criteria, so that the facilities with PBI would be as similar as possible to those without it. During the period from 2006 to 2008, Rwanda also was scaling up AIDS treatment in the same facilities. To ensure that the provision of this additional complex service did not confound the evaluation, Rwanda balanced the AIDS treatment rollout between the groups with PBI rewards and those without.

How did the PBIs work? Preliminary results show that health personnel exposed to the PBIs were more productive than personnel who were not (Gertler and others 2009). Furthermore, the health personnel with better training and knowledge responded more to the incentives. These results held for all facilities, including those with integrated HIV/AIDS diagnosis and treatment services. Even so, the results suggest that while the mere presence of AIDS services actually increased child preventive care, the presence of AIDS services combined with a PBI system more than offset this beneficial effect. Thus, care must be taken to adjust the relative strength of the incentives across different types of services if the intention is not to reduce other services.

In addition, other studies show that PBI systems can improve patient return for test results (Chaisson and others 1996; Thornton 2008) and improve patient adherence to ART—for example, by providing transportation vouchers (Sorensen and others 2007). By deploying these types of PBI systems, governments can hope to outsource critical HIV-prevention and treatment services to the private sector.

Yet another type of PBI aimed at improving incentives for successful AIDS treatment would be to outsource the monitoring of providers to patients.

Such a system could substitute for, and perhaps improve on, a portion of the expensive and logistically challenging monitoring that a central authority would otherwise perform. Treatment resources would be allocated to accredited groups of ART patients instead of to health care providers or facilities.33 Patient groups would receive training in advocacy and be charged with ensuring the precise adherence of each group member, whose CD4 counts would be monitored. Those groups in a given geographic region that succeed in sustaining and improving the clinical indicators for existing members would be the first to receive the allocation of a new treatment slot when one is available. Furthermore, a given group of patients also would be able to move its treatment budget from one group of providers to another. By giving

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the group of ART clients more bargaining power vis-Ă -vis the health care providers than any one of them would have alone, such an approach would inject into the subsidized transaction between patient and health care provider an element of market discipline and accountability.

The idea of expanding patient groups that are more successful can reach beyond treatment to influence the rate of HIV transmission in the general population. Suppose that the allocation of new treatment slots to patient groups were conditioned not only on how well they sustain the adherence of their members, but also on how well they contribute to reduced HIV incidence in a selected nearby community. For example, suppose a patient support group is composed of former prostitutes who had worked in the same risky neighborhood context. Such a group could designate that same neighborhood as their HIV-prevention target, and they could be judged on their outreach activities to prostitutes who work there and their clients.

While measurement of prevention effectiveness would be challenging for the government or donor authorized to allocate the incremental treatment slots, the groups could compete with one another on how to demonstrate their prevention effectiveness.

While based on a competitive model, such an arrangement would intentionally mute the competitive pressures to avoid several possible unintended consequences. For example, in a truly competitive model, unsuccessful firms go out of business. In this context, the dissolution of a patient support group might leave patients without support, endangering their lives. Therefore, I propose that the competition only be for incremental slots, not for existing ones.

Another unintended consequence of excessive competition might be hostility between competing patient support groups. Qualitative work by anthropologists and ethnologists to design an appropriate reward structure can mitigate this risk. For example, in many cultural contexts a winnertake-all reward structure that gives all new incremental treatment slots to the single best–performing patient support group might turn friendly competition into adversarial conflict. One way to reduce this risk is to lower the stakes of the competition by distributing available slots to several groups, in proportion to their performance scores.

To avoid either of these unintended consequences, additional incremental treatment slots must be available each year. This approach to create incentive-compatible reward structures, leveraging treatment demand for the benefit of prevention, can only work if donors and governments continue to expand treatment rolls at substantial uptake rates.

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Cash on Delivery for AIDS Treatment Over and above the PBI mechanisms for patients and providers, a cashon-delivery (COD) system could improve treatment outcomes and exert additional leverage on prevention. As discussed in chapter 2, COD applies incentives to the top levels of governmental organization—such as the state, the province, or the nation—in recognition that top-level leadership on the issue of HIV/AIDS is critical. 34 The COD approach aims to help donors facilitate longer-term commitments to sustained effort on a particular objective by establishing a reward mechanism that provides payments for the achievement of specific objectives, payments that governments can use to motivate actors and their constituencies at every level. It is quite explicitly a reward or a prize that the country or state has won because of its achievement of a challenging, worthwhile, internationally recognized social objective. For example, Center for Global Development president Nancy Birdsall, writing first with colleagues Owen Barder (2006) and William Savedoff (2010), suggests that a payment of $100 per child be made to the recipient government for every additional child who completes primary school.

Application of the COD approach to the provision of ART for AIDS patients has much in common with its application to education. In both cases, a COD program contract would need to recognize and reward “enrollment” and “persistence” in the program. The education concept of enrollment can be compared to the medical concept of treatment initiation; regular attendance to primary school completion is analogous to successful long-term adherence to medication. A COD program for AIDS treatment thus would reward a government for improvements in the total number of patients to have successfully adhered to treatment for a specified length of time, according to a payout rule agreed to in advance.

Furthermore, in both education and AIDS treatment, enrollment is much more valuable to an individual if it occurs at the appropriate time in that person’s life. The student who waits too long to start school loses forever the opportunity to maximize the benefits of schooling. Similarly an AIDS patient who waits too long to start treatment has a worse prognosis than a patient who begins treatment promptly on attaining ART eligibility.

Thus an appropriate payout rule should reward timely initiation of treatment, without excessively penalizing unavoidably tardy initiation. Given these structural similarities between primary education and AIDS treatment, lessons learned in either of these areas might be applicable to the

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other. Transferable lessons might include the nature of a feasible reward structure and the best systems for auditing results.

The COD approach to funding AIDS treatment has several advantages as a supplement to current funding approaches. First, with a properly structured reward or payout rule, COD can reward all dimensions of treatment success, not just the total number enrolled in treatment. A treatment program that accepts many people but fails to sustain each one is unacceptable.35 This imbalance can be addressed by designing the payout rule so that it rewards a patient’s survival for an additional month at a higher rate than it rewards a month of treatment for a new patient. By rewarding a treatment program for the survival of its patients, the COD system will automatically reward adherence, quality of care, and early recruitment. By also rewarding the total number enrolled in treatment, the COD system will encourage an AIDS treatment program to reach out to ever-larger numbers, including poor people.

When a COD system is first appended to a traditional command-driven system based on reimbursement of full costs plus overheads, its incremental effect hopefully will be to encourage the recipients and their partners to produce more and better treatment with the same resources— that is, to become more efficient. If the donors decide to gradually shift the mix of resources so that a larger fraction over time is paid in the COD component and a smaller share as cost-plus reimbursement for inputs, the COD’s power to improve efficiency would increase.

One essential ingredient for the success of a COD program for AIDS treatment will be establishing, at the time the COD agreement is signed, a mutually agreeable method for measuring the results against which the program will pay rewards. Donors and recipients must agree not only on which results to reward but also on how to measure those results, who will do the measurement, and who will audit them. The difficulty of this measurement problem is directly related to the number of patients under treatment.

For example, out of 125 low- and middle-income countries receiving donor funding for AIDS treatment, 57 need to keep track of fewer than 5,000 patients—a much more manageable task than keeping track of all the students who would be the subject of a COD education program in any country. Another 50 countries currently treat, or need to treat, between 10,000 and 60,000 patients. These countries will find measurement more challenging, but with assistance in the construction and maintenance of a strong patient data management system, they should be able to provide results data on all their patients. Only for the twenty or thirty countries with treatment rolls exceeding 60,000 patients and those with the weakest

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patient data management systems might it be necessary to use a representative survey of patients rather than complete data on all of them.

Just as PBI systems at the level of the provider or patient-support group can measure and reward prevention as well as treatment, a COD system also can integrate the rewards for both essential components of any AIDS control program. A comprehensive COD contract for a given country should propose a top-level payout system for both HIV prevention and AIDS treatment that also encourages national, sectoral, and sub-national decisionmakers to reward both dimensions of AIDS program success. That way, chances are greater that lower-level social entrepreneurs will invent mechanisms we have not yet thought of for aligning the interests of providers, patients, and risk-takers more closely with one another and with the country at large in the interests of sustaining AIDS mortality reductions and achieving the AIDS transition.

After seven years of enhanced effort on AIDS treatment, the international community has achieved much, but the AIDS treatment challenge only seems to be growing. By adopting the goal of the AIDS transition, the community of donors and recipients can ensure that treatment uptake continues and contributes in measureable ways to slowing HIV transmission.

Joint success in these efforts in turn will open up fiscal space to continue treatment for decades to come.

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Index

Access channels, 46–47, 48 Adherence support organizations, 56–57 Africa. See Sub-Saharan Africa; specific countries African AIDS conference (1997), 86 AIDS assistance, 28–32. See also Donors and donor funding AIDSCost model, 130–33 AIDS transition, 1–32; and AIDS assistance, 28–32; and AIDS treatment, 80–121; costs of, 17–28, 101–03; in country contexts, 14, 19–21; definition of, 1–12, 33, 84; dynamic transition to, 6–10; early victories of, 14–17; failure of, 10–11; harbingers of, 2, 12–17; and high-risk populations, 42; and HIV prevention, 26–28; and incentives, 33–79; and incidence rates, 5, 11, 17–19, 29; and macroeconomic benefits, 112; and mortality rates, 6, 10, 12–16, 25, 29; and policy change, 11–12, 29–30; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 30–32; timing of, 17–19 AIDS treatment, 1, 80–121; cash-ondelivery system for, 119–21; cost of, 80, 95–108, 130–33; coverage rates

159

for, 81, 84; dependency problems with, 84, 111; emergency plans for, 83; and entitlement programs, 80–85; and family planning, 41, 49–50; foreign assistance for, 2, 11, 92–95, 99; and “game-changing” shocks, 102–08; and health care system, 112–13; and HIV prevention, 9, 41, 53–55, 80, 113–21; and incentives, 41, 53–55, 72–73; indirect effects of, 111–15; and infected persons, exposure to, 115; macroeconomic benefits of, 111–12; overview of, 4; performance-based funding for, 116–18; private-sector, 109; quality indicators for, 80, 87–92; rationing dilemma in, 108–11; and recruitment threshold, 102–05; and resistant strains of HIV, 115; and risk behaviors, 114–15; successes and failures of, 85–99; and testing, demand for, 114; universal access to, 1–2, 26, 77, 80–82, 84, 99–101 Ainsworth, Martha, 85, 86 Allen, Susan, 50, 51–52 Antiretroviral therapy (ART), 123–29; and AIDS transition, 2, 29; as AIDS treatment, 4, 53–54; cost of, 25,

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160 INDEX 96–97, 98, 101, 123–25; and donors, 57; and drug-resistant strains of HIV, 8; early initiation of, 126–29; enrollment in, 2, 6–7, 10–11, 85, 103–04, 124–29; expansion of, 19; funding for, 82–83; and HIV prevention, 53–54, 113–14; and infected persons, exposure to, 115; macroeconomic benefits of, 111–12; and new HIV infections, 14–15; and performance-based incentives, 117–18; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 86, 88; and quality of treatment, 87, 91; and randomized controlled trials, 35; and rationing dilemma, 108, 111; retention on, 91–92; and test-and-treat policy, 55; triple-drug, 4, 85, 96 Arbitration mechanisms, binding, 67 Argentina, mortality reduction in, 12 ART. See Antiretroviral therapy Asia, HIV infections rates in, 15. See also specific countries Asymmetric information theory, 51, 52 Australia, AIDS treatment costs in, 85 Avahan project (India), 42, 43–44, 46, 47 AZT (antiretroviral drug), 85, 95 Baird, Sarah, 40 Bangladesh, health expenditures and poverty in, 108 Barder, Owen, 119 Best practices for HIV prevention, 28 Big-country bias in cash-on-delivery aid, 75 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 41, 43, 93 Birdsall, Nancy, 59, 64, 119 Birth control methods, 50. See also Condoms; Family planning Birth rates, 8, 10 Blood tests and samples, 67–68, 75–76 Boston Globe on funding for HIV programs, 82–83 Botswana: AIDS transition costs in, 21; AIDS treatment in, 77

Brazil: AIDS treatment in, 96; HIV prevention in, 58; mortality reduction in, 12 Bridge groups, 43 Bulk procurement agreements, 105 Burkina Faso: AIDS transition in, 13; drug-resistant strains of HIV in, 115 Burundi, AIDS treatment coverage in, 13–14 Bush, George W.: and AIDS treatment, 85; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 81, 86 Cambodia: AIDS transition in, 12–13; antiretroviral therapy in, 15 Cash-on-delivery (COD) aid: and AIDSprevention assistance program, 76; and AIDS treatment, 119–21; attributes of, 59–64; big-country bias in, 75; data collection for, 75–76; and enrollment concept, 119–20; for HIV prevention, 64–69, 72–73, 119–21; and incentives, 33, 58–76; negotiation costs of, 73–74; outcome measurements for, 74–75; payout rules for, 66–67, 69–72, 76, 82, 120; prevalence modeling approach to, 65–67, 70; snapshot of, 62; test-ofrecent-infection approach to, 65, 67–69; vulnerabilities of, 73–76 Cash transfers, conditional, 40–41 Catastrophic health expenditures, 108, 109 CD4 counts: and AIDS treatment, 53, 54–55; and antiretroviral therapy, 101, 126–29; guidelines on, 102–03; as HIV progression measurement, 4; and recruitment thresholds, 104–05; and treatment needs, 27 Center for Global Development, 39, 50, 58, 59, 119, 131 Certificates of HIV status, 51 Children: and AIDS transition, 8; motherto-child HIV transmission, 49–50. See also Women and girls Chile, AIDS treatment in, 87

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INDEX 1 61 China, People’s Republic of: AIDS treatment in, 86; antiretroviral therapy in, 15 Chirac, Jacques, 85, 86, 96 Chronic disease, AIDS as, 3, 15, 32, 91, 109 Civil society, 74 Clemens, Michael, 107 Clinic costs of AIDS treatment, 106–07 Clinton, Hillary, 94–95 Clinton Foundation, 96, 105 COD aid. See Cash-on-delivery aid Competitive models for patient support groups, 118 Concordant-negative couples, 52 Conditional cash transfers, 40–41 Condoms, 35, 37, 38, 45, 52 Corruption in data collection, 76 Costa Rica, AIDS treatment in, 87 Cost-effectiveness: and high-risk groups, 46; of HIV-prevention methods, 33, 34; and recruitment thresholds, 104–05 Costs: of AIDS transition, 17–28, 101–03; of AIDS treatment, 80, 95–108, 130–33; of antiretroviral therapy, 25, 96–97, 98, 101, 123–25; of drugs, 96–97, 98, 105–06, 124; of first-line therapies, 4, 21, 84, 96–97, 98, 105; of HIV prevention, 26–28 Côte d’Ivoire: AIDS treatment coverage in, 13–14; antiretroviral therapy patients in, 56, 113 Counseling for couples, 41, 42, 50–53 Couples: concordant-negative, 52; discordant, 52; fidelity among, 51; marriage, 115; testing and counseling for, 41, 42, 50–53 Cyclical theory of HIV epidemics, 16 Dallabetta, Gina, 43 DALYs (Disability-adjusted life years), 34 Data management systems, 120–21 Death rates. See Mortality rates “Demographic gifts,” 8

Demographic transition, 6, 8, 9–10. See also Population explosions Department for International Development (UK), 106 Dependency problems with AIDS treatment, 84, 111 De Walque, Damien, 41, 114–15 Diaphragms, 35, 38 Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), 34 Discordant couples, 52 Doctors. See Health personnel Donors and donor funding: and AIDS transition, 11, 28–32; and AIDS treatment, 80–85, 99; and antiretroviral therapy, 57; and cash-on-delivery aid, 119, 120; Chirac on, 86; and performance-based incentives, 41, 57–58; and uptake rates, 27. See also Foreign assistance for AIDS treatment Dow, William, 41 Drug prices, 96–97, 98, 105–06, 124 Drug-resistant strains of HIV, 4, 8, 115 Drugs. See AZT; Drug prices; Generic drugs; Stavudine; Tenofovir Due diligence in data collection, 75 Economies of scale, 124–25 The Economist on AIDS treatment, 83 Education. See School attendance Eichler, Rena, 39, 40 Emergency plans for AIDS treatment, 83 Employment subsidies, 112 Enrollment issues. See Recruitment Entitlement programs, international, 80–85, 95 Ethics review boards, 35, 36–38, 49 European Commission, 86 Family planning, 10, 18, 41, 49–50 Farmer, Paul, 20 Fidelity among couples, 51 First-line therapies: cost of, 4, 21, 84, 96–97, 98, 105; failure of, 101; and triple-drug therapy, 109 Fiscal burden of AIDS treatment. See Costs

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162 INDEX Fiscal savings in HIV prevention, 77–79 Foreign assistance for AIDS treatment, 2, 11, 92–95, 99. See also Donors and donor funding Foreign direct investment, 112 France, AIDS treatment costs in, 85 “Game-changing” shocks in AIDS treatment, 102–08 Garnett, Geoffrey, 131 Gates Foundation. See Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation GDP (Gross domestic product), 34 General Assembly, UN, 72 Generic drugs, 4, 96, 105, 109 George Washington University, 40 Germany, AIDS treatment costs in, 85 Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, 60 Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, 32, 82, 93, 94, 105 Global Health Initiative (U.S.), 94–95, 113 Global Malaria Eradication Program, 10, 11 Global Price Reporting Mechanism, 106 Global Roll Back Malaria Program, 10 Goosby, Eric, 83 Group of Eight (G-8), 80 Haiti: AIDS transition in, 19, 20–21, 23; HIV epidemic in, 16 Hallett, Timothy, 16 Hawthorne effect, 36 Health care systems, effect of AIDS treatment on, 112–13 Health expenditures, personal: catastrophic, 108, 109; out-of-pocket, 108, 109, 110; and rationing dilemma, 108–11 Health personnel, 107, 112, 117 High-income countries: antiretroviral therapy in, 128–29; drug prices in, 97; treatment costs in, 95 High-risk groups, 42; access channels for, 46, 48; and Avahan project, 43–44;

classification of, 45; interventions for, 45–46. See also Risk behaviors HIV-1 virus, 55 HIV prevention: AIDS treatment as, 9, 41, 53–55, 80, 113–21; best practices for, 28; and cash-on-delivery aid, 64–69, 72–73, 119–21; costs of, 26–28; performance-based incentives for, 33, 39–58, 116–18. See also Incentives to prevent HIV infections HIV testing, 9, 40, 114 “Hot spots,” 41, 42–47, 57 Human-rights abuses, 46, 74 Ifakara Health Institute, 41 Immunizations, 3, 35 Impact evaluations, 62, 63 Incentives to prevent HIV infections, 1, 33–79; and AIDS treatment, 41, 53–55, 72–73; and big-country bias in cash-on-delivery aid, 75; and cash-ondelivery aid, 33, 58–76; and couples testing and counseling, 41, 50–53; and data collection for cash-on-delivery aid, 75–76; and donors and performancebased incentives, 41, 57–58; and family planning, 41, 49–50; and fiscal savings, 77–79; and hot spots, targeting HIV, 41, 42–47; and male circumcision, 41, 47–49; and mobilization of AIDS patients, 56–57; and negotiation costs of cash-on-delivery aid, 73–74; and outcome measurements for cash-ondelivery aid, 74–75; and payout rules, 66–67, 69–72, 76, 82; performancebased, 33, 39–58, 116–18; and prevalence modeling approach, 65–67, 70; success of, 33, 34–39; and test-ofrecent-infection approach, 65, 67–69.

See also HIV prevention; Performancebased incentives Incidence rates: absolute, 130–31; and AIDS transition, 5, 11, 17–19, 29; for epidemics in early stages, 5, 65; and fiscal savings, 77, 78–79; of new HIV

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INDEX 1 63 infections, 16; and patient groups, 118; and payout rules, 70–72; and population explosions, 15; and test-ofrecent-infection approach, 67–69, 70, 71; and treatment costs, 26–27, 101.

See also Prevalence rates Income per capita, 123–25 India: AIDS transition in, 13; AIDS treatment in, 12, 86; antiretroviral therapy in, 15; health expenditures in, 108; and high-risk populations, 42; HIVintervention program in, 43–44; and TRIPS agreement, 105–06 India AIDS Initiative, 43 Infected persons, exposure to, 115 International AIDS Society, 81 International entitlement programs. See Entitlement programs, international Intravenous drug use, 3, 9 Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS): and AIDS transition, 2; and AIDS treatment, 87, 91, 106; and antiretroviral therapy costs, 123; on drug prices, 97; funding levels of, 84, 93; on HIV incidence, 9; “Know your epidemic—Know your response” slogan of, 42 Kazianga, Harounan, 115 Kenya: AIDS mortality in, 12; AIDS treatment in, 9; HIV epidemic in, 16; male circumcision in, 49 “Know your epidemic—Know your response” slogan, 42 Levine, Ruth, 39, 40 Low-income countries: AIDS treatment in, 25, 86–87, 89–90; antiretroviral therapy in, 2, 87, 91–92, 96, 128; and CD4 counts, 102; donor funding in, 10, 99, 120; drug prices in, 97; and funding levels, 94; and generic drugs, 106; health care personnel in, 108; transparency in, 28

Macroeconomic benefits of AIDS treatment, 111–12 Malaria prevention, 10–11, 60 Malawi, performance-based incentives in, 40–41 Male circumcision, 28, 34, 35, 41, 42, 47–49 Marriage, 115 Mauritius, health manpower in, 107 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals), 28, 84 Medicine Transparency Alliance, 106 Medlin, Carol, 41 Men who have sex with men, 74 Mexico, HIV prevention in, 12, 58 Microbicides, vaginal, 35 Microfinance, 35 Middle-income countries: AIDS transition costs in, 21; AIDS treatment in, 86–87, 89–90; antiretroviral therapy in, 2, 91–92, 96, 124; donor funding in, 10, 120; drug prices in, 97; and funding levels, 94 Millennium Challenge Corporation, 60 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 28, 84 Mortality rates: and AIDS transition, 6, 10, 12–16, 25, 29; and antiretroviral therapy, 126–29; and uptake rates, 19, 20 Mozambique: AIDS transition in, 19, 21, 23; AIDS treatment in, 115; male vs. female perceptions of AIDS in, 56 Multi-Country AIDS Program, 93 Muslims, 47 Myanmar, AIDS treatment coverage in, 13–14 Namibia, AIDS treatment in, 87 Nathan, Rose, 41 National AIDS Control Programs, 16, 61.

See also specific countries Needle-sharing, 3 Negotiation costs of cash-on-delivery aid, 73–74

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164 INDEX Nepal, poverty in, 108 NGOs. See Nongovernmental organizations Nigeria, AIDS transition in, 19–21, 22 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): as adherence support organizations, 56; and Avahan project, 44; and cashon-delivery aid, 62; and couples counseling, 53; as funding source, 105 Obama, Barack: and Global Health Initiative, 113; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 81 Opio, Alex, 16 Outcome measurements for cash-ondelivery aid, 74–75 Out-of-pocket health expenses, 108, 109, 110 Partners in Health, 20 Patents for generic drugs, 96 Patient-support groups, 117–18, 121 Patient-years of treatment, 97, 124 Payout rules: for cash-on-delivery aid, 66–67, 69–72, 76, 82, 120; and negotiation costs, 82; for prevalence modeling approach, 66–67, 70; for test-of-recent-infection approach, 69–72 PBIs. See Performance-based incentives PEPFAR. See President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Performance audits: impact evaluations, 62, 63; outcome measurements for cash-on-delivery aid, 74–75 Performance-based incentives (PBIs): and access channels, 47; for AIDS treatment, 116–18; cash-on-delivery aid vs., 59–60; definition of, 39–40, 116; for HIV prevention, 33, 39–58, 116–18 Performance-Based Incentives Working Group (2009), 40 Pharmaceuticals. See AZT; Drug prices; Generic drugs; Stavudine; Tenofovir

PLACE Method. See Priorities for Local AIDS Control Efforts “Planners” vs. “seekers,” 59, 60, 72 Poland, mortality reduction in, 12 Population explosions, 5, 6, 8, 15, 18. See also Demographic transition Poverty lines, 108–09, 110 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR): and AIDS transition, 2, 30–32; and AIDS treatment, 81, 83, 87; and antiretroviral therapy, 86, 88; and Bush, 81, 86; and couples counseling, 50; funding levels of, 16, 93, 94–95; and generic drugs, 96; and Global Health Initiative, 95, 113; and impact evaluation, 45; and male circumcision, 49; and recruitment thresholds, 103–04, 105 Prevalence modeling approach, 65–67, 70 Prevalence rates, 5, 65–66, 68. See also Incidence rates Prevention of HIV. See HIV prevention Price of drugs. See Drug prices Priorities for Local AIDS Control Efforts (PLACE Method), 42, 45, 46–47 Private-sector AIDS treatment, 109 Prostitutes, 34, 46–47, 118 Quality indicators for AIDS treatment, 80, 87–92 Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 34–39, 41, 49, 52, 113–14 Rationing dilemma in AIDS treatment, 108–11 RCTs. See Randomized controlled trials Recruitment: for antiretroviral therapy, 2, 6–7, 10–11, 85, 103–04, 124–29; for cash-on-delivery aid, 119–20; and treatment thresholds, 102–05 Religious affiliations, 47 Resistant strains of HIV. See Drugresistant strains of HIV Retention issues with antiretroviral therapy, 91–92

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INDEX 1 65 Risk behaviors, 6–7, 9, 114–15. See also High-risk groups Rwanda: AIDS patients in, 56; AIDS transition in, 12–13; antiretroviral therapy patients in, 113; couples counseling in, 52; health care center in, 112; performance-based incentives in, 116–17 “Salvage” therapy, 106 Sample sizes and survey intervals, tradeoff between, 68–69 Savedoff, William, 64, 119 Savings in HIV prevention, fiscal, 77–79 School attendance, 10, 40, 59, 64 Second-line therapies, 4, 21, 84, 96–97, 98, 101, 106 “Seekers” concept in development. See “Planners” vs. “seekers” Senegal, HIV prevention in, 12 Sex education classes, 34 Sexual intercourse: and condoms, 35, 37, 38, 45, 52; unprotected, 3, 9 Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), 35, 37, 38, 41, 42 Sexually Transmitted Infections (journal) on Avahan project, 44 Small-country capacity building, 75 Social discount rates, 21, 77 Social Security program, U.S., 83 South Africa: AIDS transition costs in, 21; antiretroviral therapy access in, 12; health manpower in, 107; male circumcision in, 49 Sri Lanka, poverty in, 108 Stavudine (AIDS drug), 105 STIs. See Sexually transmitted infections Stockman, Farah, 82–83 Sub-Saharan Africa: AIDS mortality in, 15; and AIDS transition, 12, 17–19, 21, 25–26; AIDS treatment in, 81, 91; antiretroviral therapy in, 25; fiscal savings in, 78–79; HIV incidence in, 31; malaria in, 11; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 86;

uptake rates in, 87. See also specific countries Supply chains, 57 Support groups, 56–57, 117–18, 121 Survey intervals and sample sizes and trade-off between, 68–69 Tanzania, randomized controlled trials in, 41 Tenofovir (AIDS drug), 105 “Test-and-treat” policy, 53–56, 114 Testing for HIV. See HIV testing Test-of-recent-infection (TRI) approach, 65, 67–69 Thailand: AIDS treatment in, 77, 85, 96; HIV prevention in, 58; infection rates in, 39 Therapies for AIDS. See Antiretroviral therapy; First-line therapies; Secondline therapies; Triple-drug therapy Thornton, Rebecca, 40 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 105–06 “Transition failure,” 19 Transparency, 28 “Treatment buddies,” 91 Treatment for AIDS. See AIDS treatment Treatment uptake rates. See Uptake rates TRI (test-of-recent-infection) approach, 65, 67–69 Triple-drug therapy, 4, 85, 96, 109 TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), 105–06 Tunisia, health manpower in, 107 Uganda: AIDS transition in, 13; AIDS treatment in, 83; couples counseling in, 52; HIV prevention in, 58; infection rates in, 39; male circumcision in, 49; treatment coverage in, 16 UNAIDS. See Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS), 123 UNICEF on drug prices, 97

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166 INDEX United Kingdom: AIDS treatment costs in, 85; funding levels from, 93 United States: AIDS funding from, 2, 81–82, 84, 93–95; AIDS treatment costs in, 85; ambulatory medical care in, 107 Universal access to AIDS treatment, 1–2, 26, 77, 80–82, 84, 99–101 University of California, Berkeley, 41 University of Michigan, 40 Uptake rates: and AIDSCost model, 130; and AIDS transition, 17–19, 21, 25–27, 101; and AIDS treatment, 90; in country contexts, 20–24; definition of, 87; and donor efforts, 27; and mortality rates, 19, 20; and rationing dilemma, 111; and recruitment thresholds, 103–04, 105 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 45, 86

Women and girls: and birth control, 50; and couples counseling, 52; and drugresistant strains of HIV, 115; and marriage, 115; mother-to-child HIV transmission, 49–50; and risk behaviors, 114; and school attendance, 10, 40. See also Children World Bank, 41, 42, 86, 93, 94, 97 World Health Organization (WHO): and AIDS transition, 2; and CD4 thresholds, 4, 54, 102–03; on drug prices, 97; drug-procurement mechanisms of, 106; and drug-resistant strains of HIV, 115; and generic drugs, 96; and malaria prevention, 10; and “test-andtreat” policy, 53, 55; and treatment coverage rates, 81, 84; and universal access to AIDS treatment, 99 World Trade Organization (WTO), 105–06

Vaccines, 3, 35 Vaginal microbicides, 35 Vanuatu, malaria prevention in, 60 Vietnam, antiretroviral therapy in, 15 Vouchers, 40, 117

Zambia: antiretroviral therapy in, 12; couples counseling in, 52; health manpower shortage in, 107 Zimbabwe: AIDS transition in, 13; HIV epidemic in, 16

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The Center for Global Development The Center for Global Development works to reduce global poverty and inequality through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community to make the world a more prosperous, just, and safe place for us all. The policies and practices of the rich and the powerful—in rich nations, as well as in the emerging powers, international institutions, and global corporations—have significant impacts on the world’s poor people. We aim to improve these policies and practices through research and policy engagement to expand opportunities, reduce inequalities, and improve lives everywhere. By pairing research with action, CGD goes beyond contributing to knowledge about development. We conceive of and advocate for practical policy innovations in areas such as trade, aid, health, education, climate change, labor mobility, private investment, access to finance, and global governance to foster shared prosperity in an increasingly interdependent world.

Board of Directors Edward Scott* Chair Nancy Birdsall* President Tomothy D. Adams* C. Fred Bergsten Henrietta H. Fore David Gergen Thomas R. Gibian* C. Boyden Gray James Harmon Bradley Horwitz Enrique V. Iglesias Kassahun Kebede

Mark Malloch-Brown Edward E. McNally* Robert Mosbacher, Jr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Lant Pritchett (ex officio) Sheryl Sandberg S. Jacob Scherr Smita Singh Patty Stonesifer Belinda Stronach Lawrence H. Summers Toni G. Verstandig Adam Waldman*

Honorary Members John L. Hennessy Sir Colin Lucas Amartya K. Sen Joseph E. Stiglitz * Member of the Executive Committee

Advisory Group Masood Ahmed Jere Behrman Thomas Carothers Kemal Derviş Shanta Devarajan Esther Duflo William Easterly Kristin Forbes

Carol Graham Simon Johnson Anne Krueger Gina Lambright Nancy Lee David Lindauer Mark Medish Edward Miguel

Jonathan Morduch Deepa Narayan Jane Nelson Rohini Pande Kenneth Prewitt Lant Pritchet (Chair) Raymond Robertson Dani Rodrik

David Rothkopf Rebecca Thornton John Williamson Eric Werker Ngaire Woods Ernesto Zedillo

CGD_Aids_Transition_cover-FINAL.pdf 1 6/28/2011 2:49:15 PM

Over

“Mead Over proposes a canny model for marshaling and coordinating donor contributions to AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries. Achieving an AIDS Transition includes prudent and detailed plans that promise to bring us all closer to a transition long overdue.”

— Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health “Living with AIDS is clearly better than dying with AIDS. But the best outcome is to return to an AIDS-free world. Mead Over's book provides the essential foundation for understanding the transition.”

— Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

Mead Over, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, is one of the world’s leading experts on the economics and cost-effectiveness of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment Achieving an AIDS Transition

“There is an urgent need to take a long-term view on AIDS. Achieving an AIDS Transition is thought-provoking and provides an important contribution to this vital debate.”

— Peter Piot, former executive director of UNAIDS

Achieving an AIDS Transition

Mead Over CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT